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I am genuinely curious, in your experience of working with "legacy" projects, what platforms/languages, with codebases of approximately the same age/turnover/ty
by jrochkind1 5y ago
I am genuinely curious, in your experience of working with "legacy" projects, what platforms/languages, with codebases of approximately the same age/turnover/type-of-project as the Rails ones, were significantly "less shit"? You didn't answer that part! Or, I guess, you implied Django?
- handrous 5y agoI did cover that—it's irrelevant, because Rails in particular is much worse, at similar levels of neglect or incompetence, than lots of other frameworks+languages. It's a joy to build with from scratch, and it's fine as long as your team is steady, disciplined, quite good, and mainly focused on your Rails codebase (that is, it doesn't go for long stretches without eyeballs on it and effort going into keeping it up). Deviate from that ideal state and it starts to turn awful in a hurry—and of course other languages and frameworks do, too, but the curve for Rails codebases that fall of that ideal plateau of quality is much harsher than most.
- jrochkind1 5y agoSo you have worked with legacy codebases at similar levels of age and project type that haven't been as bad as the Rails ones? I am just curious to know what they are! I don't understand why you don't want to tell me, but ok, the end!
- handrous 5y agoAll proprietary ones, but yes, of course. I don't know what you think I'm trying to avoid telling you—I've worked on a lot of codebases in a lot of languages for a lot of different platforms over ~20 years, and repeated exposure to Rails codebases (maybe half a dozen of them?) has yielded the observations already posted: that they are like closed-ecosystem terrariums, which are beautiful until something goes slightly wrong, and then everything good about them withers and dies in short order.