This is a rare treat. Someone who actually gave Rails a good couple of hours, but couldn’t get anything done, and thus hates its guts:

Well, I’ve found this: it’s fucking horrible. Anyone who tries to convince you that it’s in some way an elegant and consistent way to create ‘web applications’ is entirely insane. It’s taking me hours and hours just to get the most basic of stuff done, and a lot of that time was spent wrestling with the hideous documentation and bizarre, frustrating syntax.

Now get this. Since he was unable to get something done quickly (too steep a learning curve), the poor chap wants to give Python and Zope a swing ;). Not an evil word about either, but the learning curve of the latter is not exactly known to be flat. Heh.

This thought on “pre-written code” is also pretty funny:

If you really must use lots of pre-written code (and hey, sometimes that is handy — a DBMS-agnostic interface, say) then get to grips with Pear for PHP.

That’s actually both a testament to PHP (you can get something done without using any external frameworks or libraries at all), but also an interesting reflection about a fair share of PHP programmers work (they don’t use or like “pre-written code”).

In any case, he’s frustrations were real. It would be nice to hear about them in specific so we can do something about it. Although, it does bring a smile to read “it’s fucking horrible”. It seems like we’ve made it all the way around the programmer spectrum with that.