My Thoughts on Merb/Rails Merger

My first reaction to this news was pretty much to scream “NOOO!!!” I’d recently really been getting to love the Merb framework. No one ever likes change but this is one that I still honestly can’t fathom. It’s not that I lack faith in the Merb team to do their integration, it’s that I lack faith in Rails. Anything that comes with that name comes with a lot of stigma, because honestly, I have never had a positive experience with any framework that was Rails or an offshoot of it.

Merb made me fall in love with programming again, I loved the community on IRCand to be able to listen in for merbcamp and to be honest this news was pretty much like hearing “I’m seeing someone else.”

If anyone involved in Merb is reading this, I’m not trying to fault you in your decisions. I know you’ve been stressing over the last few days that Rails 3 will be better than Merb 1.x and that it will be good for the Ruby community. I honestly hope so. But there was one major pull from Merb for me that this merge kills: Merb isn’t Rails. Merb community isn’t Rails community.

There was a substantial appeal to working with a technology that was on the cutting edge and Merb was a niche technology. Now that’s going away and Merb no longer has any appeal to me since it doesn’t have the “underground” feel that it had a month or two ago for me.

This hurts a lot honestly, because I was beginning to really get into it, but I just can’t get the bad taste out of my mouth at the moment.

So Merb guys, please prove me wrong.