Just a quick post to point out a bit of a discussion going on in the blogosphere about Ruby on Rails. Steve Coast points out what he calls a trend towards... to put it in nicer terms than he uses... Ruby on Rails navel gazing. In his posting "What the hell is happening to Rails," Coast points out that the framework and language have gotten more complicated and difficult to use over the years, particularly with the release of version 3.0. He goes on to state that 3.1 continues this trend, and has effectively made Ruby on Rails inaccessible to newcomers. He points out that Rails used to have a default route for catching all exceptions, but that now, you have to add a route for every exception by hand. Other quibbles about changes in the framework are cited in the piece, as well.

As this is, after all, the InterWebs, there are dissenting opinions. Ernie Miller offers up his own take on the trend, and calls Coast out a bit. Miller refers to Rails as "Opinionated software." It's kind of an extension of the thinking that states "If a developer doesn't have strong opinions about development tools and languages, he might not be that good at programming." Certainly, I dont' subscribe to this theory, but I do have to admit that some of the best programmers I've ever met spend an awful lot of time bad mouthing other frameworks/languages/etc. It's more of a stereotype than anything else. Miller dives much deeper, however, so I suggest reading both gentlemens' opinions and forming your own. His contention is that, as Rails evolves, it will should continue to push in very distinct directions, with distinct goals, or "opinions," as these opinions help to remove ambiguity that could trip up a newbie.

And if you want some more info on Rails 3.1, check out this posting at Nodeta about asset pipelines in Rails 3.1.

Update: Yehuda Katz has now weighed in with some excellent insight.