= Essay =

I've been reading a bit about Ruby On Rails ( http://www.rubyonrails.org/ ), and the hype surrounding it -- and I think for a minimalist such as myself it is intriguing.  First, I've always abhored Javascript because it's like letting an untrusted user run almost arbitrary code in your machine's security context.  Of course sandboxes are an attempt to mitigate that, but the risk of simulating the presentation too well is always at hand.  So while Ruby On Rails seems interesting, I'm not sure how much I'd like it.

Yes, Ruby appears to be a language that's taken a lot of input from the Python and Perl (and LISP and PHP, et cetera) communities and done the Right Thing most steps of the way, and it's the next language I want to spend a lot of time with, but this integrated JavaScript thing -- I'm just left with mixed feelings.  Pehaps if it were done in Python I could keep myself untainted by both ugly concepts, but this is Ruby, and I have to consider it.

That said, I've considered it, and I can see a place for AJAX given such nice apps as maps.google.com, but when I have a text browser up, I really just need to get work done, and the more AJAX, the more I fear the web will Balkanize into AJAX-graphical-manipulation worlds and the rest of the world, where text browsers are useful.  My philosophy thus, as it always has been, is to keep JavaScript out of the required interface elements and into a time-added-interface for those who don't grok text-based interfaces so well.  I always find, instead that text-based interfaces are simply faster than graphical interfaces in most cases.  True, I won't part with my mouse just yet, and it has its place, but I think 99% of the time, I really just want to use my Vulcan Mind Meld into my keyboard for interfacing into my computer.