So, in recent days there has been a lot of really stupid drama among Rails and Merb.  I appreciate the addresses of both sides of the issue, and I hope this dialogue and competition continues in this healthy manner.  But my interest was piqued when the question of lines of code came up, and Yehuda offered some metrics.  

Now, these were very unfair because, like most Merb vs. Rails comparisons, there is no parity given to features.  Comparing merb-core to ActionPack is not only unfair, it's basically deceptive.  ActionPack does nearly everything contained in the whole of merb-stack (edit: except the ORM part but you get the idea).  In any event, I got curious: what if I stripped ActionPack down?

So I started tearing out code.  I started in ActionController, un-including modules one by one until it caused Rails to break, re-including it to fix Rails.  I was able to tear out the vast majority of the code in there, but I wasn't able to strip it down to the same feature set as merb-core (f.e., I have to keep all the rendering engines in there).  Even so, at the end of my little trial, ActionPack only had 10,846 lines of code and still did more than merb-core.  If I took out ActionView (merb-core lacks most but not all of its features), it's only 7,000.  The exact same as Merb.  And it still does more!

What am I trying to say?  It doesn't matter.  Who cares?  This is stupid.  It's a useless, unfair comparison.  Don't bring up LOC ever again.  Comparing LOC is as useful as Array#fourth.  Get a job.  Cut your hair.  Take a shower, you unwashed heathen.  However you phrase it, having a pissing match about lines of code in your framework just wastes a lot of time, especially when neither side gives the whole thing a fair shake.

Permalink

| Leave a comment  »