5 ms·

Whoever wrote this seems to have an extreme hatred of Ruby on Rails. I've personally never used it, but... wow, that was a lot of hate.

by Xuzz 16y ago

rantfoil 16y ago
Author lost total credibility at that point. Rails is quite elegant, and yes, it is just another tool. Totally unsubstantiated bashing. Surprised to see this on the homepage.
- timrobinson 16y ago
  Not terribly consistent bashing, either: "Want to write Android apps? Learn Java." "About Java [...]. The way you're going to learn how to program is completely different than the world of Java [...]."
  - Xuzz 16y ago
    There is a distinction there: the way Java is used in the enterprise and for Android apps is very different.
    - timrobinson 16y ago
      Still, I think it's a bit strong for a "so you want to learn programming" email. If I was looking for advice, I'd rather start with the technology and learn the cultural differences myself.
- exDM69 16y ago
  His words were quite harsh, but I do have to agree with him to some point. Rails has a culture of "magic", they have conventions on how to do things (e.g. naming stuff) and you aren't really allowed to diverge from that. This does not appeal to me and I'm not surprised to see that others don't like it either. However, I can see how Rails "gets things done", and why so many people like it. Perhaps the author came clear with his opinion a bit too hastily, but you shouldn't ignore someone just because you don't agree with every opinion he has. This was not an article about "why I don't like Rails", that's probably why he did not explain why he doesn't like it. What comes to the article itself, I think it was decent and I don't agree 100% but not bad advice either.
  - pdelgallego 16y ago
    > His words were quite harsh, but I do have to agree with him to some point. Rails has a culture of "magic", they have conventions on how to do things (e.g. naming stuff) and you aren't really allowed to diverge from that. Here we go with the "magic". It is not magic, it just code. Many people are just too lazy to investigate why things works the way they do, and how to change it when the defaults don't fit their needs. Just for the record, you are wrong about naming conventions, they don't act as mandatory, you can use configuration methods to set up things the way you like it. E.g Class Users set_table_name “Usuarios” end Rails has many drawback points, I rather prefer Django views, than Rails, but all this "magic" conspiracy theory is just childish.
  - MEHColeman 16y ago
    To be fair, there is no magic in Rails, just a lot of 'defaults'. If you look at the code, its all very clear how those defaults are enabled, and there are clear methods for overriding them. The 'magic' thing started as a sort of marketing spiel to say "look at all these things that you don't need to worry about configuring, because they are all set to sensible defaults" but became 'mysterious' in some people's minds.
  - urbanophile 16y ago
    My first programming language was BASIC on a Commodore 64. So I've gone through many languages and frameworks in my day. In the last year I started writing an app in Ruby/Rails and I must say as someone with experience in other things, I like it. I happen to like the "magic" aspect of Rails. The downside is that it does make Rails suitable for certain types of development and less so for things that fall outside of its paradigm. That's Ok, as long as you know that. Having said that, my app was actually OLAP, not OLTP, but I was able to extend the framework pretty well to do what I wanted, including working with legacy schemas. So it is more flexible than some give it credit for. To me the real power isn't in Rails though, it's Ruby, which is the best programming language I've used, albeit extremely slow and inefficient. I haven't not used Python, so want to be clear I'm not making a Ruby v. Python claim.
yzhengyu 16y ago
I have a love-hate relationship with various ORMs - Hibernate, iBatis, etc. I can understand why he hates Rails, which auto-magically does alot of things for the web developer. The thing is that as a programmer, you need to realize that these frameworks might be abstracting too many details away. This will be burdensome to many people in various scenarios, including one where you as an expert need to hold the hand of the new guy so that he can use the ORM effectively or one where you as the newcomer is attempting to learn the framework yet can't get anywhere because it does what Rails does - alot of hidden magic which you don't understand unless you go dig through the source or go to the forums to start asking questions.
zedshaw 16y ago
I swear it wasn't me. :-)
robinduckett 16y ago
How can you tell? Ruby is mentioned once, and it's in the context of "Want to learn X? Learn X".
- MEHColeman 16y ago
  The paragraph starting "There's a lot of crap out there."

Whoever wrote this seems to have an extreme hatred of Ruby on Rails. I've personally never used it, but... wow, that was a lot of hate.

by Xuzz 16y ago

Whoever wrote this seems to have an extreme hatred of Ruby on Rails. I've personally never used it, but... wow, that was a lot of hate.

rantfoil 16y ago

Author lost total credibility at that point. Rails is quite elegant, and yes, it is just another tool. Totally unsubstantiated bashing. Surprised to see this on the homepage.

timrobinson 16y ago
Not terribly consistent bashing, either: "Want to write Android apps? Learn Java." "About Java [...]. The way you're going to learn how to program is completely different than the world of Java [...]."
- Xuzz 16y ago
  There is a distinction there: the way Java is used in the enterprise and for Android apps is very different.
  - timrobinson 16y ago
    Still, I think it's a bit strong for a "so you want to learn programming" email. If I was looking for advice, I'd rather start with the technology and learn the cultural differences myself.
exDM69 16y ago
His words were quite harsh, but I do have to agree with him to some point. Rails has a culture of "magic", they have conventions on how to do things (e.g. naming stuff) and you aren't really allowed to diverge from that. This does not appeal to me and I'm not surprised to see that others don't like it either. However, I can see how Rails "gets things done", and why so many people like it. Perhaps the author came clear with his opinion a bit too hastily, but you shouldn't ignore someone just because you don't agree with every opinion he has. This was not an article about "why I don't like Rails", that's probably why he did not explain why he doesn't like it. What comes to the article itself, I think it was decent and I don't agree 100% but not bad advice either.
- pdelgallego 16y ago
  > His words were quite harsh, but I do have to agree with him to some point. Rails has a culture of "magic", they have conventions on how to do things (e.g. naming stuff) and you aren't really allowed to diverge from that. Here we go with the "magic". It is not magic, it just code. Many people are just too lazy to investigate why things works the way they do, and how to change it when the defaults don't fit their needs. Just for the record, you are wrong about naming conventions, they don't act as mandatory, you can use configuration methods to set up things the way you like it. E.g Class Users set_table_name “Usuarios” end Rails has many drawback points, I rather prefer Django views, than Rails, but all this "magic" conspiracy theory is just childish.
- MEHColeman 16y ago
  To be fair, there is no magic in Rails, just a lot of 'defaults'. If you look at the code, its all very clear how those defaults are enabled, and there are clear methods for overriding them. The 'magic' thing started as a sort of marketing spiel to say "look at all these things that you don't need to worry about configuring, because they are all set to sensible defaults" but became 'mysterious' in some people's minds.
- urbanophile 16y ago
  My first programming language was BASIC on a Commodore 64. So I've gone through many languages and frameworks in my day. In the last year I started writing an app in Ruby/Rails and I must say as someone with experience in other things, I like it. I happen to like the "magic" aspect of Rails. The downside is that it does make Rails suitable for certain types of development and less so for things that fall outside of its paradigm. That's Ok, as long as you know that. Having said that, my app was actually OLAP, not OLTP, but I was able to extend the framework pretty well to do what I wanted, including working with legacy schemas. So it is more flexible than some give it credit for. To me the real power isn't in Rails though, it's Ruby, which is the best programming language I've used, albeit extremely slow and inefficient. I haven't not used Python, so want to be clear I'm not making a Ruby v. Python claim.

yzhengyu 16y ago

I have a love-hate relationship with various ORMs - Hibernate, iBatis, etc. I can understand why he hates Rails, which auto-magically does alot of things for the web developer. The thing is that as a programmer, you need to realize that these frameworks might be abstracting too many details away. This will be burdensome to many people in various scenarios, including one where you as an expert need to hold the hand of the new guy so that he can use the ORM effectively or one where you as the newcomer is attempting to learn the framework yet can't get anywhere because it does what Rails does - alot of hidden magic which you don't understand unless you go dig through the source or go to the forums to start asking questions.

zedshaw 16y ago

I swear it wasn't me. :-)

robinduckett 16y ago

How can you tell? Ruby is mentioned once, and it's in the context of "Want to learn X? Learn X".

MEHColeman 16y ago
The paragraph starting "There's a lot of crap out there."