“I do hope that RoR doesn’t get injected with Bloatus Maximus over the course of ten years.”

Hey, I’d be willing to bet large sums of money that it will get injected, big time:-) Such is the nature of the enginedering porftion of the human mind — complicating the existing solutions is an irresistible lure. In other words, we excell at making things exorbitantly expensive. Hardly anyone is impressed with a bargain.

But I’m not too worried about it. Some other ’simplifier’, that is, a clear thinking mind, will come along and rescue us from the future Bloatus Maximus mess, like the creator of RoR did last year.

Remember the XML initiative? It started as a small-footprint, agile little system to avoid the bloat of entrenched mainframe and other technology-driven document formats. Look at it today — much more bloated than any mainframe format of the past ever was.

Pretty soon we’ll need a meta-markup language to simplify the existing markup languages:-) Engineers are certainly extremely lousy when it comes to keeping things simple.

Alex