a few minutes ago I finished my rewrite of shellshadow in merb
1.0.6.1.  This took on and off a few months as merb 1.0 was in flux.
Its late (6am in Shanghai), I'm very tired,  I haven't finished my
Christmas shopping yet, but I checked the merb google group before
going to bed.  I see this merger announcement.
ok, fine.  I'll have to sleep on it and then I guess I'll wait a few
months to see what happens.

But what I went through:
2007: launched shellshadow in rails 1.2.3.  I was very unhappy with
the experience (read below to see why I had some insight into
frameworks)
2008 - April: re-launched with a rewrite of shellshadow in merb 0.9.2
+ datamapper 0.2.5
2008 - December: re-launch shellshadow rewrite in merb 1.0 + dm 0.9.8

Do you know how tired I am of following the framework curve?  Let me
explain...

I wrote the world's first ORM in smalltalk in 1988.  From then through
the early 90s I wrote and re-wrote several frameworks until I evolved
a "full-stack".
In '94, I wrote the world's first full-stack app framework,
"patternWare", in Smalltalk.
I re-wrote patternWare in Java starting in '98 - 400,000 lines of Java
code, an ORB, the whole frickin' kitchen sink. I eschewed and blew by
the promise of J2EE.  Yes, it was DRY, and all the other goodness the
ruby worlds thinks it invented.  Well, ok, the smalltalk stuff was
much DRY-er than the Java ;)
The above frameworks were used by many Fortune 100 companies.  Big
honkin' enterprise apps that required a mature easy to use framework
that could be taught to old-school COBOL programmers.  F/OSS
principles didn't apply then.  My customers didn't pay for beta code.
I literally spent a decade trying to explain to anyone that would
listen the importance of this thing I was calling an "application
framework".

That all started 20 years ago...Now I'm tired.  I'm too old to hack
away on frameworks.  There are plenty of smart young people to do
this.  I may have some value to add to this community.  Maybe not.
But really I'm just tired and all I want to do is write a webapp that
has sound underpinnings.  Due to the permissive nature of the web,
this requires frameworks.

All I ask is for the community to take it easy.  Do you really think
you can fix all the outstanding bugs in merb 1.0.x while putting such
an extraordinary effort into Rails 3?  The answer is yes, given a long
enough timeline.  But no, if you're too aggressive.

Please try to take it easy on people, like me, who's main interest
these days is publishing a webapp, not following the edge.
Frameworks, like math, is a young man's sport.  I've had my days of
existential scheming in the snow.

thanks for your continued help and understanding.  And thanks for
letting me have my little rant here ;)
My biggest fear about this merger is that I won't have such close
access to the people that make merb great.  I feel the contact will be
drowned in a sea of Rails.

take care and Merry Christmas to you all.

- Jon

On Dec 24, 4:55 am, Michael Klishin <[email protected]>
wrote:
> On 23.12.2008, at 23:46, Zack Ham wrote:
>
> >  I really hope that merb's naming scheme wins out.
> > Application beats ApplicationController and before beats
> > before_filter.
>
> I personally think Rails convention will win simply because there is  
> more code to change otherwise. But it does not look like a problem to  
> me.
> There are much more important things like making ActiveSupport monkey  
> patch less aggressive and perform better, make ORM finally pluggable,  
> etc.
>
> MK
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