5 ms·

This article is a superb example of bad writing, of bad thinking. I have no skin in the Ruby/Rails game. I'm not a web developer. But I'm interested in the fate

This article is a superb example of bad writing, of bad thinking. I have no skin in the Ruby/Rails game. I'm not a web developer. But I'm interested in the fates of languages and the merits of major approaches that define many jobs and decide the employability of millions, so I read it. The problem is: what in the world is he saying? What is his thesis, and what reason does he give us for believing his thesis? His opening section summarizes as: "I started to read a rant. It made me mad so I wrote a rant. Then I read the whole thing and felt better, so I wrote this." Okay, now try to summarize the second section. Something about Rails and Basecamp. Wordpress. Apple crushed Adobe. Finally: "Then there is the issue that Ruby's future is now tightly coupled with Rails." What issue? What is the point of all this? Sorry, OP, this is bad writing. It's bad thinking. It's saying "stuff" without knowing why. My advice: if you have skin in this game and need to make real decisions about what platform/language you use, find an article that reasons soundly about what the questions are and convinces you of its answers. Don't listen to this one. And if this quality of thinking is diagnostic of how Ruby/Rails developers think generally... well I'm glad that's a game my skin is safe from.

tboyd47 10y ago
I found it pretty coherent, actually. The author is trying to reset our focus from the technical details of how Rails works to the bigger picture of how the market for web technology has evolved over time. All the more important for those of us with "skin in the game," which I'm guessing means coders, because we tend to be myopic about our little world of symbols and tools, and often get caught clueless when the rug gets pulled out from under us by market forces that are indifferent to which design patterns are objectively better than others.
- justinwr 10y ago
  I concur. Coming from São Paulo, Brazil, I thought Akita's post was well written and derived out of positive, lightly spoken, opinion. Breath of fresh air against the backdrop of hostile tech machoism.
edbloom 10y ago
Ah now that's a bit harsh. I thought it was pretty clear. Perhaps not getting to the point as quick as possible - but clear nevertheless.
Dwolb 10y ago
I read the article first to give it a chance and I have to say you're correct in your diagnosis. The author's main issue with his writing style is he makes logical leaps without bringing the user along. He jumps from topic to topic without letting the user know why he's doing so. I think the piece can be improved with some structural changes. So I would recommend the author or other readers consider this style for structurally formulating arguments for essays or presentations [1] often used at McKinsey. (Note: I know McKinsey gets a lot of hate around here sometimes, but given their ability to consult with C-suite leadership, they're probably pretty good at formulating arguments/persuasion) [1] https://medium.com/lessons-from-mckinsey/the-pyramid-principle-f0885dd3c5c7#.1cqc3qqoh https://medium.com/lessons-from-mckinsey/the-pyramid-princip...
- rodolphoarruda 10y ago
  This also has to do with the differences between a high-context language (Portuguese) and a low-context language (English). Portuguese is my first language, and I can remember that I needed a lot feedback from native English speakers in order to fine tune my speech -- let alone writing -- so they could actually get it. RE: http://www.thunderbird.edu/article/understanding-high-and-low-context-languages http://www.thunderbird.edu/article/understanding-high-and-lo...
  - Dwolb 10y ago
    That's really interesting - I hadn't heard of this difference between languages. Thanks for sharing. Do you feel differences in context-type of a language means persuasion techniques differ as well?
    - rodolphoarruda 10y ago
      I am not an expert on persuasion techniques, but if you take the same "logical leaps" situation you described in your comment and put it into the context of a business negotiation, chances are the other party may not feel confident enough to do business or simply to agree with you in some conditions because they don't get your line of thought.
jkmcf 10y ago
He's writing in his second (third?) language. How's your second language? Akita is a pretty smart dude. He makes a number of good points, and maybe doesn't tie them perfectly together, but it's a blog post he wrote in a day, not for Harpers. A few points from his rant: 1. If you don't drink the kool aid, you'll be frustrated if you want something else 2. market forces: you have to follow rails, but if rails changes or goes away, you're stuck (-ish, it's OSS) 3. rails is good at what it does, and provides many with a useful framework, even if, in retrospect, it isn't well architected
- mangeletti 10y ago
  The point @putzdown is making is not that the OP has many typos, etc., but rather that the article is incoherent babble with no structure, no point, and no evidence to support its non-point. If Akita had written: Sometimes, tools and frameworks, like Wordpress and Rails, respectively, gain enough traction that their monopoly economies of scale keep them afloat long after their value sunsets. That would have sufficed.
  - putzdown 10y ago
    Precisely. It would have sufficed, and it would have been an unremarkable reaffirmation of the sad reality that yes, widespread habits trump merit in many cases (Betamax vs VHS etc etc). It's not clear what he said, but if all he said was, "Sure Rails stinks but the majority uses it so suck it up," I don't think it'd be an article worth applauding.
hardwaresofton 10y ago
I also agree that it's rambling, but clearly not first language so I'll give it a pass. The general thesis seems to be that The frustration that Solnic felt with Rails is understandable, and quite possibly inevitable, as rails has become mainstream, large, and a ripe target for disruption by other frameworks/libraries. Despite this, Rails is still an excellent framework due to it's easy-rampup for beginners, and flexibility for more experienced developers. Here is my summary of the sections, as I understood them: Accepting Reality: - Ruby is not much without rails. - Large frameworks are written by entities that can afford to, so they are not held to the whims of other large entities (angular/polymer for google, react for fb, etc). It's just a power struggle. - Rails can be compared to Wordpress, though wordpress's codebase is worse, rails suffers from similar lockin as tools like wordpress and magento. - The community of rails is well-connected, and if large enough entities invest in rails & ruby, it will be fine, and will continue progressing through the natural cycles of OSS projects Laws of market reality: - Rule 1) Hindsight is 20/20 - Rule 2) No solution is perfect - Rule 3) You either build tools for yourself or for others, fits-you or fits-the-market - Avoid building businesses completely on frameworks/platforms made available by large entities, as they may dissapear at a moment's notice (i.e. don't tunnel-vision angular because google might kill it like GWT) - Beware of churn and external reasons for software projects being put out to pasture. - There is too much churn, and there are too many companies trying to make the next big thing. This can maek the monopolies provided by ASP.NET and Rails very attractive. - There are many similarities between rails, asp.net and spring in that they shield you from churn and offer a tyrannical but relatively-unchanging toolset - Frameworks either die heroes or live long enough to become the villain Why is this a problem for rails now? What is the history of rails and it's competitors? - The technical points from Solnic's article mostly have merit - DHH has flaws, and rails is very much his brainchild. He created it while he had a business to run - People flocked to rails from various languages/frameworks (.NET, PHP, Java), so they could drop unnecessary abstractions - People got addicted to writing ruby, for it's simplicity and productivity advantages over PHP, Java, and C# - 2007-2011 were magical years (the silver age) for ruby adoption, every drinks rails koolaid. Merb tries to capitalize and fails (though it was ahead of it's time). - 2011-2016 was a bittersweet period (the bronze age). Other languages have created their own frameworks, and are similarly productive to ruby, so they start to gain attention. Languages like Node, rust, clojure, elixir and even haskell. - The bronze age also sees big companies start to release languages (apple with swift, google with dart and go, microsoft with typescript ASP.NET MVC, facebook with react) - Rails is having this issue because it was meant to. It is being disrupted just as it's predecessors were. It is inevitable. - Being the incumbent, rails is vulnerable because it cannot move or change as fast. - The dominant model has also shifted, from rails-y backends to much simpler APIs talking to SPAs (Single Page Apps). Apis are much smaller cand can be written easily in various other languages - For small to medium projects that fit rails's model, rails is still king. As wordpress is still king for blogs -- yes you could write a blog with go APIs and using react, but it's not wise. - If you're using ra ils as a medium sized company, make sure you're using all the lastest rails practices -- it may not make sense to pursue a rewrite right away. Conclusion: - Solnic has a point, the rails community has become a frustrating place to be for many people, but it has built lots of momentum. It also common for people to side with the underdog frameworks. - Rails made the transition from underdog to mainstream in 5 years, and has done a lot for web development. It's hard to offer all of what rails offers and power the web as it has done. - ActiveRecord is indeed a rough point for rail's architecture, but there's no alternative that offers benefit worth the pain of a rewrite. New applications thould definitely use rails + trailblazer or go straight to the Hanami framework, but most will probably just ditch ruby. - ActiveRecord could be better, but it looks like even the creator of DataMapper has moved away from ORMs. For the usual case, ActiveRecord is still a good technology to use. - Other communities will face the same issues rails is having, as they become mainstream. It's inevitable that DHH has chosen not to make large sweeping changes to rails, and although it alienates experienced developers, starting with rails is still easy for beginners. - People forget the magic of rails that beginners feel when they start, and rails wins because of it's simplicity when learning as a beginner, as well as enabling experienced developers to make tweaks to it. - It's anyone's guess whether rails will last another 10 years given all the competition it's currently facing
mmm10 10y ago
You know the post is bad when the second paragraph is: First of all, it's inevitable but I still hate dramatic headlines, even though I write like this myself sometimes. "My time with Rails is up" like it's saying "And you should leave Rails now too if you're smart". I dismissed the article entirely because of that. I was about to post a counter-rant to that without reading it properly, but now that I have, I wrote this new article from scratch. How can someone admit that he started writing a counter-rant without reading the original post? I know he said he changed and started from scratch but if someone admits something like this you can't expect something good afterwards. This might explain why the rest of the post is just he spiting random stuff to pretend anything there makes sense. If you go over other posts in that blog you will notice the same pattern: spit random (and most of the time wrong) stuff in an attempt that something will make sense (which never does).
- FooBarWidget 10y ago
  I cannot agree. I think lots of people (myself included) didn't read the original article and responded purely based on the title. I think that by admitting that he didn't read it and that he corrected that later, he's showing humility (that he too is a fallible human) and that gives his article -more- credibility.
  - mmm10 10y ago
    Responding to something without reading it is just stupid. There's no other way to describe such an action.
insane_dreamer 10y ago
Did you read the article he was commenting on? If so, his article makes lots of sense. Don't blame your lack of understanding on the author.

tboyd47 10y ago

I found it pretty coherent, actually. The author is trying to reset our focus from the technical details of how Rails works to the bigger picture of how the market for web technology has evolved over time. All the more important for those of us with "skin in the game," which I'm guessing means coders, because we tend to be myopic about our little world of symbols and tools, and often get caught clueless when the rug gets pulled out from under us by market forces that are indifferent to which design patterns are objectively better than others.

justinwr 10y ago
I concur. Coming from São Paulo, Brazil, I thought Akita's post was well written and derived out of positive, lightly spoken, opinion. Breath of fresh air against the backdrop of hostile tech machoism.

edbloom 10y ago

Ah now that's a bit harsh. I thought it was pretty clear. Perhaps not getting to the point as quick as possible - but clear nevertheless.

Dwolb 10y ago

I read the article first to give it a chance and I have to say you're correct in your diagnosis. The author's main issue with his writing style is he makes logical leaps without bringing the user along. He jumps from topic to topic without letting the user know why he's doing so. I think the piece can be improved with some structural changes. So I would recommend the author or other readers consider this style for structurally formulating arguments for essays or presentations [1] often used at McKinsey. (Note: I know McKinsey gets a lot of hate around here sometimes, but given their ability to consult with C-suite leadership, they're probably pretty good at formulating arguments/persuasion) [1] https://medium.com/lessons-from-mckinsey/the-pyramid-principle-f0885dd3c5c7#.1cqc3qqoh https://medium.com/lessons-from-mckinsey/the-pyramid-princip...

rodolphoarruda 10y ago
This also has to do with the differences between a high-context language (Portuguese) and a low-context language (English). Portuguese is my first language, and I can remember that I needed a lot feedback from native English speakers in order to fine tune my speech -- let alone writing -- so they could actually get it. RE: http://www.thunderbird.edu/article/understanding-high-and-low-context-languages http://www.thunderbird.edu/article/understanding-high-and-lo...
- Dwolb 10y ago
  That's really interesting - I hadn't heard of this difference between languages. Thanks for sharing. Do you feel differences in context-type of a language means persuasion techniques differ as well?
  - rodolphoarruda 10y ago
    I am not an expert on persuasion techniques, but if you take the same "logical leaps" situation you described in your comment and put it into the context of a business negotiation, chances are the other party may not feel confident enough to do business or simply to agree with you in some conditions because they don't get your line of thought.

jkmcf 10y ago

He's writing in his second (third?) language. How's your second language? Akita is a pretty smart dude. He makes a number of good points, and maybe doesn't tie them perfectly together, but it's a blog post he wrote in a day, not for Harpers. A few points from his rant: 1. If you don't drink the kool aid, you'll be frustrated if you want something else 2. market forces: you have to follow rails, but if rails changes or goes away, you're stuck (-ish, it's OSS) 3. rails is good at what it does, and provides many with a useful framework, even if, in retrospect, it isn't well architected

mangeletti 10y ago
The point @putzdown is making is not that the OP has many typos, etc., but rather that the article is incoherent babble with no structure, no point, and no evidence to support its non-point. If Akita had written: Sometimes, tools and frameworks, like Wordpress and Rails, respectively, gain enough traction that their monopoly economies of scale keep them afloat long after their value sunsets. That would have sufficed.
- putzdown 10y ago
  Precisely. It would have sufficed, and it would have been an unremarkable reaffirmation of the sad reality that yes, widespread habits trump merit in many cases (Betamax vs VHS etc etc). It's not clear what he said, but if all he said was, "Sure Rails stinks but the majority uses it so suck it up," I don't think it'd be an article worth applauding.

hardwaresofton 10y ago

I also agree that it's rambling, but clearly not first language so I'll give it a pass. The general thesis seems to be that The frustration that Solnic felt with Rails is understandable, and quite possibly inevitable, as rails has become mainstream, large, and a ripe target for disruption by other frameworks/libraries. Despite this, Rails is still an excellent framework due to it's easy-rampup for beginners, and flexibility for more experienced developers. Here is my summary of the sections, as I understood them: Accepting Reality: - Ruby is not much without rails. - Large frameworks are written by entities that can afford to, so they are not held to the whims of other large entities (angular/polymer for google, react for fb, etc). It's just a power struggle. - Rails can be compared to Wordpress, though wordpress's codebase is worse, rails suffers from similar lockin as tools like wordpress and magento. - The community of rails is well-connected, and if large enough entities invest in rails & ruby, it will be fine, and will continue progressing through the natural cycles of OSS projects Laws of market reality: - Rule 1) Hindsight is 20/20 - Rule 2) No solution is perfect - Rule 3) You either build tools for yourself or for others, fits-you or fits-the-market - Avoid building businesses completely on frameworks/platforms made available by large entities, as they may dissapear at a moment's notice (i.e. don't tunnel-vision angular because google might kill it like GWT) - Beware of churn and external reasons for software projects being put out to pasture. - There is too much churn, and there are too many companies trying to make the next big thing. This can maek the monopolies provided by ASP.NET and Rails very attractive. - There are many similarities between rails, asp.net and spring in that they shield you from churn and offer a tyrannical but relatively-unchanging toolset - Frameworks either die heroes or live long enough to become the villain Why is this a problem for rails now? What is the history of rails and it's competitors? - The technical points from Solnic's article mostly have merit - DHH has flaws, and rails is very much his brainchild. He created it while he had a business to run - People flocked to rails from various languages/frameworks (.NET, PHP, Java), so they could drop unnecessary abstractions - People got addicted to writing ruby, for it's simplicity and productivity advantages over PHP, Java, and C# - 2007-2011 were magical years (the silver age) for ruby adoption, every drinks rails koolaid. Merb tries to capitalize and fails (though it was ahead of it's time). - 2011-2016 was a bittersweet period (the bronze age). Other languages have created their own frameworks, and are similarly productive to ruby, so they start to gain attention. Languages like Node, rust, clojure, elixir and even haskell. - The bronze age also sees big companies start to release languages (apple with swift, google with dart and go, microsoft with typescript ASP.NET MVC, facebook with react) - Rails is having this issue because it was meant to. It is being disrupted just as it's predecessors were. It is inevitable. - Being the incumbent, rails is vulnerable because it cannot move or change as fast. - The dominant model has also shifted, from rails-y backends to much simpler APIs talking to SPAs (Single Page Apps). Apis are much smaller cand can be written easily in various other languages - For small to medium projects that fit rails's model, rails is still king. As wordpress is still king for blogs -- yes you could write a blog with go APIs and using react, but it's not wise. - If you're using ra ils as a medium sized company, make sure you're using all the lastest rails practices -- it may not make sense to pursue a rewrite right away. Conclusion: - Solnic has a point, the rails community has become a frustrating place to be for many people, but it has built lots of momentum. It also common for people to side with the underdog frameworks. - Rails made the transition from underdog to mainstream in 5 years, and has done a lot for web development. It's hard to offer all of what rails offers and power the web as it has done. - ActiveRecord is indeed a rough point for rail's architecture, but there's no alternative that offers benefit worth the pain of a rewrite. New applications thould definitely use rails + trailblazer or go straight to the Hanami framework, but most will probably just ditch ruby. - ActiveRecord could be better, but it looks like even the creator of DataMapper has moved away from ORMs. For the usual case, ActiveRecord is still a good technology to use. - Other communities will face the same issues rails is having, as they become mainstream. It's inevitable that DHH has chosen not to make large sweeping changes to rails, and although it alienates experienced developers, starting with rails is still easy for beginners. - People forget the magic of rails that beginners feel when they start, and rails wins because of it's simplicity when learning as a beginner, as well as enabling experienced developers to make tweaks to it. - It's anyone's guess whether rails will last another 10 years given all the competition it's currently facing

mmm10 10y ago

You know the post is bad when the second paragraph is: First of all, it's inevitable but I still hate dramatic headlines, even though I write like this myself sometimes. "My time with Rails is up" like it's saying "And you should leave Rails now too if you're smart". I dismissed the article entirely because of that. I was about to post a counter-rant to that without reading it properly, but now that I have, I wrote this new article from scratch. How can someone admit that he started writing a counter-rant without reading the original post? I know he said he changed and started from scratch but if someone admits something like this you can't expect something good afterwards. This might explain why the rest of the post is just he spiting random stuff to pretend anything there makes sense. If you go over other posts in that blog you will notice the same pattern: spit random (and most of the time wrong) stuff in an attempt that something will make sense (which never does).

FooBarWidget 10y ago
I cannot agree. I think lots of people (myself included) didn't read the original article and responded purely based on the title. I think that by admitting that he didn't read it and that he corrected that later, he's showing humility (that he too is a fallible human) and that gives his article -more- credibility.
- mmm10 10y ago
  Responding to something without reading it is just stupid. There's no other way to describe such an action.

insane_dreamer 10y ago

Did you read the article he was commenting on? If so, his article makes lots of sense. Don't blame your lack of understanding on the author.