Yehuda Katz

Hey OtengiM, I'm the maintainer of the Merb project. I voted your comment up, because I think it's silly for people to vote down comments simply because they disagree with them. I'd like to respond to a few of your comments. First up, I don't think that the strength of Ruby is Rails. I think Rails demonstrated a number of really interesting ideas, and was able to leverage Ruby's expressiveness enough to make it a leader. Some of those ideas include embracing the 80/20 rule and convention over configuration. Ruby's real power, however, comes from its strong opinion, through the language itself and its idioms, that code be as readable as possible. Merb started mostly as a refinement of the ideas in Rails, but now focuses on taking the 80/20 rule a bit further. For applications that get beyond the 80% that Rails makes easy, Merb allows a more granular opt-out strategy, so people building innovative applications can still make use of much of the core code, while building their own modules on top where appropriate. As you alluded to, a monoculture, as they have in ASP.net land, is not actually beneficial to the community. With Merb, Rubyists can choose between Rails, which is a mature, opinionated framework that works well for the 80% of the 80-20 rule, and Merb, a Ruby framework pushing the envelope of speed, efficiency, and modularity, which will work better for innovative applications leveraging new technologies.