Though I’m not a fan of the popular buzzword web framework, Ruby On Rails, I noticed something the other day: there seems to be a correlation between design beauty and use of Rails. Every app or site I’ve stumbled upon that uses the framework has a great, often minimal design that is quite pleasing to the eye. Perhaps it’s the fact that the people who design these sites have similar tastes in methodologies when it comes to programming languages: sweet, clean, and simple.
Those are just my two cents, but still don’t believe me? Check out some of these sites based on Rails:
Then again, it could just be the influence of “Web 2.0″ design concepts that make all these sites look great, but largely similar in terms of design elements (yes, Web 2.0 gets quotes from me). Stupid Web 2.0.
Personally, I perfer PHP, and I have seen a whole bunch of sites that look great that are made in PHP ie Digg.
I do agree that Rails is pretty much linked to nicely designed pages because everyone jumping on Rails is jumping on web 2.0 and making simplistic, elegant designs.
It’s interesting whether it’s that rails is so linked with web 2.0 or if there is actually something about coding ruby that attracts better designers.
Comment by Dustin Bachrach — March 29, 2007 @ 11:46 pm
Good points. My money’s on Rails being linked with Web 2.0 since it’s basically only been around since Web 2.0 has.
As far as Ruby attracting better designers, that wouldn’t surprise me, as Ruby is very high-level and syntacticly nonconforming in comparison to the sort of standard syntax of PHP or Perl. Because of this, I’d imagine that a designer of a less technical mindset would be interested in a language they could pretty easily pick up.
Comment by Henry — March 30, 2007 @ 1:37 am