Rev 4.0 article on TheServerSide

[Kevin Miller]

On 02/12/2009 20:41, "Andre Garzia" <andre at andregarzia.com> wrote:

> Actually I think some of the comments have a point. That language
> comparision pdf is misleading. Even I could write better code than that in
> those languages. I would suggest people on runrev would change that pdf to
> present optimum code in C++/C#/JAVA and the like, like, very professional
> code and see how well Rev stacks against it, even if they are all one
> liners, Rev will be more readable and thus win points. If you post crappy
> code, the users of those languages will clearly recognize the pdf as a bad
> practice and have a bad impression of the language.

Given the feedback, I think there is room for improvement on our part here.
The goal of these examples was to present real-world use cases where average
people wrote the code in each of the languages. Programmers generally don't
write perfect code all the time so that doesn't make for a very realistic
comparison of how much time the average developer will save on a day to day
basis. Its not genius vs. genius, its typical user vs. typical user. The
question we were asking was "Which language is going to be easier in day to
day use"? For example, the code on the PHP comparison was based on an
example posted on a site that *teaches* how to write PHP. So clearly its of
a standard that is used in the real world. If you're an expert coding in PHP
every day you can shorten it. Same with the revTalk example as it happens.

There is a fine line to walk here in terms of actually getting covered and
creating a talking point with strong headlines and ensuring that we present
our case in a way that does not detract from our message. Without bold
headlines and "best case" claims we simply don't get covered, we're not
interesting or newsworthy. Its been tricky to find ways to articulate our
advantages clearly to people who have little time or appetite to hear about
"yet another" language. There isn't anything untrue about what we're
claiming, there are plenty of customer cases that we can point to who truly
have made the sorts of savings we have been pushing in our marketing. These
are real people who have saved a lot of budget or had projects enabled that
would otherwise not have been done. There are plenty of programmers who
would write code just like those examples in each of the languages
presented. And there are always going to be people who will dislike and
flame Rev whatever we do. But getting coverage means that many other people
will have an opportunity to take a look and make up their own mind.

As important as all these points are, I wholeheartedly agreed that we have
to ensure that we hold a sophisticated and informed debate that makes the
point clearly and in a way that does not detract from our message by people
getting derailed. One such way for that to happen would be for a subset of
experienced professional programmers to take our examples in the wrong way.
So we will take another pass at these examples to see how we can improve
what we are communicating here.

Kind regards,

Kevin

Kevin Miller ~ kevin at runrev.com ~ http://www.runrev.com/
RunRev - Software construction for everyone