8 ms·

I haven't used rails in about 3 years (when I first started programming) and I only built 1 application which was a super shitty weekend instagram clone that di

I haven't used rails in about 3 years (when I first started programming) and I only built 1 application which was a super shitty weekend instagram clone that didn't really work well. I didn't want to use rails anymore because it didn't feel like programming and nodeJS was getting hot. The thing is, I knew fuck all about programming then and now, I have the luxury of knowing very slightly less than fuck all. Which gives me the perspective that this article has, rails is pretty fucking awesome for building a crud application that uses a relational datastore. The author indicated ~80%. Wordpress is also something I swore off when I was learning because it straight up wasn't programming. I installed wordpress on a server for the first time last week to setup a blog. I browsed a few thousand themes, it took me a while to find a theme for a blog. The just a blogging platform is actually more ironic now, than it ever was. So, I agree with the author the design patterns shape the community and then the community shapes the design patterns. You can pretty much build any type of app with any language if you are motivated and talented, however, from my observation, the following languages seem to give you the highest leverage in the domains the community has evolved them for: PHP/Wordpress: Blogging sites & CMS building. Node/JS: Applications and APIs typically with a noSQL database. Ruby/Rails: Building CRUD apps with relational datastores. Python: Data intensive applications & programming. erlang/elixir: Never used this, but seems ideal for highly scalable concurrent architecture and highly scalable process choreography. So in essence, I agree with the author. I would love to switch from node to Rails as I like the framework aspect where you can just get productive super quick. I also see rails as going away, so I wouldn't make the time investment. I think learning node was the right thing to do ~3 years ago, but I wish I spent another 6 months using rails and got really comfortable with it first. > This is not serious programming/you aren't a serious programmer fairplay. I am a jr. web developer, explaining my conception of some frameworks/communities/languages, so I agree with you that I am not a particularly talented programmer (it isn't my core skillset) and I am not solving hard problems in this arena(as I don't conetend that I am). I disagree that I claimed any of the above was my definition of serious programming. Of the hard problems I will work on/what I think needs to be solved, I have spoken of at length elsewhere.

rubiquity 10y ago
> I didn't want to use rails anymore because it didn't feel like programming and nodeJS was getting hot. > Wordpress is also something I swore off when I was learning because it straight up wasn't programming > Python: Data intensive applications & programming. I would love to hear your definition of programming.
- vonklaus 10y ago
  I still sort of stand by those statements, but again that was based on a beginners completely incorrect view of the world. However, to add a bit more color to those statements which maybe you can infer how I think about programming? I meant something like: Rails/Ruby was very popular bit it was a framework. You could do a massive amount with very little work. You could build an entire app without any knowledge of what Rails did for you under the hood. NodeJS was a developing technology of which I could gain massive leverage, both learning why asynchronous processes work(I still have trouble with these)/general programming concepts as well as double down on a front end language. The v8 compiler and ryan dahl seemed to provide a good avenue for which to learn lower level(at least than rails) about programming and it seemed to embody the unix philosophy. This seemed like a good place to be and I could grow within a community that was going to be influential. HTML, CSS and SCSS were pretty easy to learn, so by learning a single database technology and javascript I could be a full-stack developer. Not in the sense of how I would market myself, but that I could go out and build a full application if I wanted to and that was poweful and awesome from a learning experience. Given the proliferation of nosql The database, front-end, orm, and back-end were entirely javascript so I didn't pay a high context switching penalty. wordpress: I dislike wordpress. I don't think it would make any sense to tell someone interested in programming front or back end software to learn "wordpress". Wordpress is a great convenience for setting up a blog, but I presume they have a CMS as well. I don't know much about it, only doing the most basic PHP stuff, but PHP & Wordpress seem to be synonymous with client facing software that requires a CMS/non-technical user to make updates. python. I mean, python at least from my understanding is a great language for processing data. It is why tensorflow ships as a python library and numpy is used for a lot of data work. The communities using R and python work with data at scale and thus those communities have developed a lot of tooling to accomplish this, not that this stuff needs to be done in python, but machine learning, textual parsing and classification libraries and some NLP stuff all seem to hit python first. However, oython does have a great community writing secure applications. Django and Flask, sqlalchemy ORM as well as zeroDB exist and there are communities using python for apps, data parsing, and microservice deployments. However, I define prgramming (like most people) as a schedule of television or radio broadcasts.

rubiquity 10y ago

> I didn't want to use rails anymore because it didn't feel like programming and nodeJS was getting hot. > Wordpress is also something I swore off when I was learning because it straight up wasn't programming > Python: Data intensive applications & programming. I would love to hear your definition of programming.

vonklaus 10y ago
I still sort of stand by those statements, but again that was based on a beginners completely incorrect view of the world. However, to add a bit more color to those statements which maybe you can infer how I think about programming? I meant something like: Rails/Ruby was very popular bit it was a framework. You could do a massive amount with very little work. You could build an entire app without any knowledge of what Rails did for you under the hood. NodeJS was a developing technology of which I could gain massive leverage, both learning why asynchronous processes work(I still have trouble with these)/general programming concepts as well as double down on a front end language. The v8 compiler and ryan dahl seemed to provide a good avenue for which to learn lower level(at least than rails) about programming and it seemed to embody the unix philosophy. This seemed like a good place to be and I could grow within a community that was going to be influential. HTML, CSS and SCSS were pretty easy to learn, so by learning a single database technology and javascript I could be a full-stack developer. Not in the sense of how I would market myself, but that I could go out and build a full application if I wanted to and that was poweful and awesome from a learning experience. Given the proliferation of nosql The database, front-end, orm, and back-end were entirely javascript so I didn't pay a high context switching penalty. wordpress: I dislike wordpress. I don't think it would make any sense to tell someone interested in programming front or back end software to learn "wordpress". Wordpress is a great convenience for setting up a blog, but I presume they have a CMS as well. I don't know much about it, only doing the most basic PHP stuff, but PHP & Wordpress seem to be synonymous with client facing software that requires a CMS/non-technical user to make updates. python. I mean, python at least from my understanding is a great language for processing data. It is why tensorflow ships as a python library and numpy is used for a lot of data work. The communities using R and python work with data at scale and thus those communities have developed a lot of tooling to accomplish this, not that this stuff needs to be done in python, but machine learning, textual parsing and classification libraries and some NLP stuff all seem to hit python first. However, oython does have a great community writing secure applications. Django and Flask, sqlalchemy ORM as well as zeroDB exist and there are communities using python for apps, data parsing, and microservice deployments. However, I define prgramming (like most people) as a schedule of television or radio broadcasts.