Improvement Ravine
October 19th, 2006I was struck by the timeliness of this essay by Martin Fowler. It’s something I face everyday as I’m stumbling through my way to do a simple webapp in Lisp. Well, Ruby’s ravine is deceptively simple, so I might have forgotten the trials of learning a new language. It’s always the same. But for me, the ravine seems especially deep and long compared with say, Rails because it’s optimized for web development, and let’s me prototype something non-trivial in a matter of few hours.
Not so with CL, as I have to cobble together different alternatives for web servers, try them out, different html-generating frameworks, again check them out, and finally whether to go for a JavaScript/CSS-generating framework or not, etc. It temptation is is very much there to just do it in Rails and be done with it. But CL keeps beckoning me with that “Quality Without a Name”. For now, I’m plodding on. Let’s see how far the plateau is, or if it exists at all (at least with respect to webapps).