Thursday, July 27, 2006

Do We Have To Sacrifice Virgins?

Obie Fernandez (and Ben Bleything) had some thoughts on the Seaside presentation at OSCON:
Avi, on how to do maintenance and debugging on Seaside servers: "We can just vnc into the server. Squeak has vnc built into it."

Django Jacob, "Of course it does..."

I'm having fun in this session, sitting next to Ben Bleything, and trying not to contribute to the sporadic chuckling and heckling about the voodooo magic of Seaside. This is definitely one of the more enjoyable sessions I've attended so far, but I don't think Seaside poses serious competition to any of the major web frameworks.

I'm a little disappointed with this coming from Rails developers. I guess when you become the mainstream you can start thumbing your nose at non-mainstream technology. I see both Rails and Seaside as technologies to show how easy things can be. Sure, Seaside seems more like voodoo and the ideas "out there". But, the technology and ideas have been around for quite sometime. I guess I love being a part of the lunatic fringe. It's always more fun. I've enjoyed the meteoric rise of Rails, but I guess I thought Ruby enthusiasts would have more respect for what Seaside is doing. Or at least understand it. I wonder how many java developers still heckle and chuckle at Rails' voodoo? I didn't expect such comments from my dynamic brothers.

Don't worry guys, I still love you. There's space for both of us. You are always welcome at my table. I would never heckle you, only share my ideas and thoughts.

"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win."-Gandhi

3 comments:

Ben Bleything said...

Blaine-

I can't speak for Obie, of course, but I certainly don't feel the way you seem to think. I'm incredibly impressed by Seaside and Smalltalk in general. Avi is clearly a very smart guy doing very smart stuff.

I was IMing Obie during the talk, and said "it's probably just because I don't understand smalltalk, but this feels like total voodoo to me".

But I don't think voodoo is a bad thing. Voodoo is what gets me interested in something; I want to figure out how it works.

I don't feel like I'm in any position to comment on whether or not Seaside poses a "threat"... I don't even totally buy that there's a competition.

Ravi said...

It is "Gandhi" (spelling).

Nice Title!

gnupate said...

The talk was great, and the heckling was good natured. In fact, Avi invited the heckling explicitly and interacted well with it.

While I agree that Seaside probably won't crack into a whole lot of development shops, the developers that refuse to think about the ideas it's built on are going to miss out on a lot of growth. I don't think Obie, or anyone in the (packed) crowd was ignoring the cool things Avi was doing, and a lot of us are going to be chewing on the ideas for a while -- even if we chew on them while hacking with Ruby.