Are Batteries Included?
Thursday 20th October 6:30pm at The Manchester Digital Laboratory (MadLab)
Moving from another language or framework to Rails is daunting as a beginner, but once you know your way around, simple tasks become effortless. Big tasks, however, can quickly result in having to fight the framework. So is this situation resolved in another language like Clojure, where there is an emphasis on being able to switch components and libraries, and Convention Over Configuration is not a tenet of the dev environment?
This is a high-level discussion of some things that you come to appreciate when moving from Rails - where there’s usually one or two accepted ways of doing something, and the means to do tasks ‘baked in’. Even in a complex application, does the ‘batteries included’ approach still result in a net positive? That’s probably too big a question to tackle alone, but hopefully this short talk will make for a good discussion in the pub.
Rails will be compared with building applications using a Clojure web stack - the structure of this will be familiar to any that have used micro-frameworks like Flask (in Python) or Sinatra (in Ruby). You might even see some lisp - but don’t worry, the parens don't bite.
About the speaker
Alex Lynham is a Rails developer who over the past three years has gradually found himself gravitating towards functional programming, lisp and talking in the third person. On balance, he suspects he likes his batteries included.