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I can't grasp the hostile attitude towards rails at HN. Even agreeing with (some) of the criticism, I'm deeply thankful to Rails, DHH and everyone else involved
by matt4077 10y ago
I can't grasp the hostile attitude towards rails at HN. Even agreeing with (some) of the criticism, I'm deeply thankful to Rails, DHH and everyone else involved.
Because before rails 1.0, I worked in php.
Many people may actually be too young to remember, but the jump from php and anything else that was state-of-the-art at the time to rails was without doubt the biggest leap web development ever took.
The most meaningful advances actually weren't just technical but social. It would've been possible to write an excellent webapp before rails, but just about nobody ever did. The opinionated nature of Rails many are complaining about today was a revolution because it taught everyone using it good architecture. You can nitpick about any one of those opinions, sure. But back then it was common to join a project with >100kloc with directories containing password.php, passwprds.php, pass.v3-old.inc, large_image.head.2002-v1.jpg & employees.xls. The quality of almost any rails project I have seen is, in comparison, excellent. It'd say a new team member on a rails project was productive in less than a third of the time it took in non-rails projects at the time.
So, to anyone complaining: I'm pretty sure that looking into any of your strongest held believes on web dev, you'll discover that rails had significant influence in creating them in the first place. To do something like that, pretty much as just one guy on the beginning, should afford someone a certain amount of respect.
- ascendantlogic 10y agoThis is my initial response as well. I came from the land of Java web dev and Rails was the best thing to ever happen. But it's been 10+ years since it really took the world by storm and things have changed. This "I will never use Rails again" saber rattling is just linkbait crap but well reasoned critiques of tools and patterns are always a good thing.
- sanderjd 10y agoI whole-heartedly agree with everything you said, but I also felt stifled and stymied by Rails for years, and am happy to be doing other things at the moment. It is possible (and I think fairly common) to both deeply appreciate Rails while finding fault with it, and to respect the validity of its approach while preferring other tools.
- mattmcknight 10y agoSame, but coming from the hell of Java web applications. They had the opposite problem, too much architecture.
- heartbreak 10y agoWhich is funny, because that's what exactly what the OP wants from Rails.
- mattmcknight 10y agoI see it more as he wants Data Mapper to be as easy as Active Record. Just from a pure patterns perspective, it never will be, because Data Mapper has one additional level of complexity.
- eonw 10y agoI would argue that is was perfectly possible before rails, many projects never left PHP and are doing just fine with it. Wordpress for instance, i think Facebook also?