Strong Opinions Usually Hurt
I’ve learned that holding religiously strong opinions about matters usually hurt in the long run. Each choice in life brings with it a certain set of pros and cons. And by blinding ourselves to a particular option usually entails sacrificing the pros of the other one.
For example, the developers in the Rails community are usually very clear about using either Haml or ERB. Those who use Haml love its terseness and barebones structure, while the ERB camp seems to refresh their love for HTML whenever they talk about ERB.
It’s easier to use ERB if you have designers in the team who are more familiar with HTML. ERB keeps the structure simple and as close to HTML as possible. With that, having to make sure you’re closing that tag or not is a big pain. It’s also verbose at times and feels like it doesn’t get to the point.
Haml on the other hand, while being terse, seems too programmatic at times. It’s not designer friendly. There is a learning curve for newbies. It’s cumbersome for content heavy views, though it has filters to deal with that.
I’ve always thought Haml is worth the learning effort but I’ve grown to appreciate the need of Erb too. I wanted to feel the overall structure of my HTML page but missed the speed of hammering out Haml to prototype. To remedy this, I’ve started using ERB for layouts while keeping separate views in Haml. It gives me the best of both worlds.
I am not harsh about using any one of these now and appreciate both technologies on their merit in given circumstances. I think as a community, we can learn a lot and grow together if we think this way. Now, is RSpec better or test-unit? :)
