Read a few messages in that one. People get into such heated arguments!
You have to give the Lisp people some credit: the shiny pedestal they’re shouting from is, in fact, a solid, firm mass of righteousness. They are basically correct in their assertion that the vast majority of us are, in fact, unwashed heathens in comparison to their macro-enabled, parens enveloped, functional selves.
That said, I chuckled when I read:
Rails is actually very good, if you consider ASP/JSP/PHP as its competition.
How can you not evaluate it that way? Isn’t that what the other 90% of web developers are using? What exactly would any framework wanting to attract experienced web developers compete against? What is this other, sadly ignored superior architecture that has been somewhat well tested and used by a critical mass of professional developers?
Maybe I’m overdoing it. Anyways, don’t get me wrong. In reality, I actually really hope Seaside picks up, because I loved learning SmallTalk. I’d miss a few pet features, but in the end I could be happy there too. In fact, I fully expect Seaside to be better designed, and I hope Weblocks takes off too! It’s just, you guys haven’t got that critical mass yet, and your quirks are more daunting that most. When your first book comes out, maybe I’ll look into it.
Your biggest concern is that no one reasonably happy and comfortable writing PHP everyday is likely to have an epiphany and pick up Practical Common Lisp tomorrow. The anti-lisp sentiment runs strong, and it’s not like it’s fractioned environment is without it’s pitfalls. SmallTalk is probably privy to these same problems.
Man, it’s fun to be a mostly uninformed pundit! It’s silly how I can form an elaborate opinion based on skimming a few books, briefly trying things, reading lots of blogs and programmer’s bias.
