[vidarh]

ERB (one of a ton of view engines you plug into rails):

    <% Model.friends.each do |person| %>
        <p><%=person.name %></p>
    <% end %>

Or:

    <% for person in Model.friends %>
        <p><%=person.name %></p>
    <% end %>

I don't even like Rails, but I fail to see how that is "really smelly". Or as I prefer Mustache, I'd probably rather pass Model.friends to the view as a variable and do:

    {{#friends}}
        <p>{{name}}</p>
    {{/friends}}

But regardless what engine you do, you'd be hard pressed to find any big differences in terms of iterating over a collection. I find it very hard to believe that you're a Rails developer yet somehow find the above syntax so much more elegant that you'll use that as an example of how rails has a "really smelly" view engine.

[sergiotapia]

You don't see how uncomfortable for the hands it is to type `<%` and closing `%>` every single time you want to output something using code?

How can you compare that, to a simple `@` symbol? ERB (or even Mustache for that matter, feel like a relic compares to Razor.

[irahul]

> You don't see how uncomfortable for the hands it is to type `<%` and closing `%>` every single time you want to output something using code? How can you compare that, to a simple `@` symbol? ERB (or even Mustache for that matter, feel like a relic compares to Razor.

I don't think you are doing an objective evaluation.

1. All goddamn editors can be configured to do a short key for the expression(I have mapped \1 to `<% %>` and \2 to `<%= %>`)

2. If that is too much of work, use Haml http://haml.info/tutorial.html or Slim http://slim-lang.com/

    # slim
    - persons.each do |person|
      p = person


   # haml
   - persons.each do |person|
     %p = person

[sergiotapia]

You're comparing something that comes out of the box (Razor) with something you can achieve comfort with after wiring up hotkeys and snippets. That's not a fair, clinical comparison.

Are you kidding me?

Slim looks like something much MUCH better than the crufty old ERB.

[irahul]

> You're comparing something that comes out of the box (Razor) with something you can achieve comfort with after wiring up hotkeys and snippets.

And what difference it makes if it comes with Rails or I have to add an entry to Gemfile? Ruby has many different templates. What comes bundled with Rails is totally up to creators. DHH is opposed to haml https://twitter.com/dhh/status/58289541068492800 and hence, erb is the default which is unlikely to change.

They don't even have to accommodate alternate templates(which they do seamlessly). Do you cry a river every time you have to use a library which doesn't come bundled with .net?

> Slim looks like something much MUCH better than the crufty old ERB.

And it's better than Razor's crufty syntax as well.

But please keep tooting your horn about your Razor. I have wasted enough time here.

[vidarh]

If you don't like that, you can use haml for example, or any number of other engines. It didn't even occur to me that anyone would care enough about the <% for that to be the point.

If it matters, it'd take about an hour to put together a wrapper to let you use the @foreach ... { } syntax with Rails. Nobody bothers because this is about item #1045 on the list of pain points in web development.

FWIW: For my part I consider it a massive smell to have what appears to be code in the templates, which is why I prefer Mustache and similar which explicitly force the logic to be kept separate, so to me the Razor example and ERB examples look equally hideous.