Archive for November, 2006

Does India have a scarcity of good programmers?

Monday, November 20th, 2006
This is a very common problem that I have heard from many people. Probably programming is not considered a cool job in india. Most good programmers (and bad also) want to become people manager.I don’t blame them also. We have grown to this stage merely because of outsourcing. In low value programming, quality does not matter much. So most people want to become manager and do only talking. That is very scary. In that case India can never build good products.My only hope is freshers and young engineer from universities. They haven’t yet been spoiled by our current system. Hopefully more and more innovation come from them.What I can tell to these computer science graduates is that they need to think about innovation. They should not become slave of some programming language or a particular platform. Continuously ask yourself how can computer science be used to make our society better. If the world need products build in javascript/XML then why only learn C++. You should be able to learn anything quickly and provide your employer a solution which he never even thought about.

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RubyOnRails

Sunday, November 19th, 2006

I had been thinking about starting my blog for quite some time. Finally I’m starting it with a nice topic. I spent some time on exploring ruby on rails. I feel like telling the whole world about it.

First I could not find why ruby is a great language. Then Himanshu, a friend of mine, mentioned that ruby is a cute language. I guess that describes ruby. Its a nice and cute language but no major differentiator.

But Rails is what makes it special. Its great tool for psuedo-techies who want to build quick websites. Having said that, I dont mean it is not a great tool for techies. But I could not get answered to some questions on it.

  • It works in a fast-cgi mod. Which does not look very clean. The latest recommendation is to use apache+reverse proxy+mongrel. It looks pretty geeky and nice but has some fundamental problems with it. Apache does a nice job of taking care of memory leaks etc. by restarting apache after every N requests. That may not be possible with mongrel. Also, I am not sure how easy is it to monitor mongrel.
  • rails generates some code for you which I personally dont like too much. The way one will package such things is generate rails code and then check-in it in cvs or another source control system. But in next version of rails, things may change. In that case merging changes will be a pain.
  • I have a feeling that scalaing will not be easy with rails as it does too many things for you and hides details.

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