I started writing a comment on Patrick's post, and it become so large that I'm making a seperate blog post out of it:

Lucas, while there are definitely advantages to providing sensible default behavior through an implicit approach, your example is so ridiculous that it's difficult to give your statement any credibility. Any micro comparison of source code length, or even the simple fact that you're comparing number of lines should make many developers look away.

It's utterly ridiculous to compare how long it took you to bash a simple application together. What is important (to me) is that I will be able to maintain that application for years and years, that other developers can easily find their way and take it over, that there's no doubt, that the maintenance cost doesn't get too high for the customer, that I don't have to spend days to just try to unravel what I did years ago and that I can easily call someone to help me out for a brief period when I find that the workload is too high.

I agree that many frameworks went a bit overboard in the configuration department, but starting off with implicit 'magic' behavior doesn't really rock my boat either.

About tadalist, that application is so stupid that I'm wondering how the hell it could have taken him 600 lines to write it. Also, the hugely hiped 'killer application' of RoR, Basecamp, is a total fraud imho. The screenshots look nice, and are nicely presented. So I did make an account and started using it. And honestly, everything they say is true, it sets itself apart in simplicity. Not difficult to write that in a few weeks. At least I hoped that the critical errors that I got during the testing would have disappeared after so many months of hyping. This made me really wonder about the maintainability and the transparency of a system written in RoR. If the demonstration application about which workshops are given refused me to perform work by spewing critical errors, I get rather suspicious. I revoked my account since I felt quite cut down in productivity by using it.

Lastly, I think that driving a web application from a database structure is totally backwards. It makes it very difficult to migrate to other structures over time and you're limited by the meta-data that your database supports. If you want to base yourself on a data structure, you should use domain objects with appropriate meta-data. Of course, then you get some kind of configuration and your precious line count might increase.

While RoR is greatly marketed and that Active Records nicely uses some of Ruby's features, I yet have to see something that really impresses me. Writing Ruby code in the middle of your HTML certainly didn't.