I read this OnLamp tutorial, Rolling with Ruby on Rails and came away somewhat unimpressed. Even leaving aside the fact that there seem to be major version and compatibility problems (see the comments at the end of the article), it doesn't really live up to his claim that building web apps will become ten times easier. And whatever value of n you substitute for ten, it's still not the difficult bits it makes quicker, just the boring bits, surely? Plus, the moment I want to do stuff my way, it leaves me with a messy code-embedded-in-HTML setup, which I swore I'd never touch again.
What do monks think about it? Is it a just a buzz-word technology, or a useful example of integrating technologies so that we aren't all reinventing the wheel? How hard would it be to recreate that kind of rapid development tool in Perl? Is there anything like this in Perl 6?
($_='kkvvttuu bbooppuuiiffss qqffssmm iibbddllffss')
=~y~b-v~a-z~s; print