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Ruby has such wonderful evangelists that somewhere along the line I had gotten the idea that all Rails projects had 100% test coverage, and refactoring was a ma

Ruby has such wonderful evangelists that somewhere along the line I had gotten the idea that all Rails projects had 100% test coverage, and refactoring was a matter of course. It's kind of a relief to hear that not only do not all projects live up to the ideals, some are the exact opposite. Knowing that, maybe I can go a little easier on myself when I fail to live up to the ideals, and simply keep on striving without having to feel that I am obviously an inferior coder.

wccrawford 15y ago
lol That's exactly the opposite of what the author was trying to accomplish with this article. ;)
amcintyre 15y ago
"Ruby has such wonderful evangelists that somewhere along the line I had gotten the idea that all Rails projects had 100% test coverage, and refactoring was a matter of course." Somehow, I (somebody with zero Ruby experience, and very little web dev experience) had ended up with the same impression. That certainly is some good evangelism.
mechanical_fish 15y ago
Again, it's about maturity. Every popular young platform has a relatively large amount of evangelical fervor and a relatively small amount of real-world long-term experience. Java was no different, years ago.
- kd1220 15y ago
  The two Rails programmers I've met didn't know Ruby itself very well. Also both had to bow out of their contract jobs because neither could build a functioning CMS in less than a year. When I talked to them it sounded like they were kicking ass and getting things done, but they were just vomiting buzzwords apparently. When I started using PHP ten years ago, I inherited an existing project. Two days into it I thought to myself: "PHP is kind of like Perl, but less useful." I guess I missed the PHP hype phase. If it had one. I've never been a language evangelist. I just solve problems with whatever technology is most appropriate for the case.
avdi 15y ago
The striving is the key. Keep it up!
epochwolf 15y ago
I deal with this at work. The code has never been refactored. There are unit tests for some areas but the views and controllers have so many lines of code and so many unneeded branches that attempting a test there is near impossible now. As soon as I came to the team I've managed to accomplish two minoir refactoring jobs in small areas of the code. I've pitched a more major refactor to the team and now we just need to get it passed our manager. My own projects generally lack extensive testing (and the code lacks complex code paths) but I refactor heavily.
- SoftwareMaven 15y ago
  How can you refactor heavily with minimal unit tests? How do you ensure you aren't breaking things?
  - epochwolf 15y ago
    Because there is very little code that's affected. Most parts of my app are largely isolated.
angelbob 15y ago
I taught myself Ruby and Rails on my couch, by myself, over years. But I did it after a more-than-ten-year C/C++ career. I continued to be amazed and nonplussed that a community could do so well and know so many technologies so fluently when I took so long to learn them. And now that I've met a bunch of Rails people in person and am considered a Rails guru by two consecutive companies, I'll tell you that yeah, it's mostly hype. Not that Rails is bad -- it rocks. But it requires a lot of background in deep, messy Ruby to really do well, and there's a lot of bad Ruby and Rails code out there. How could it be otherwise?

wccrawford 15y ago

lol That's exactly the opposite of what the author was trying to accomplish with this article. ;)

amcintyre 15y ago

"Ruby has such wonderful evangelists that somewhere along the line I had gotten the idea that all Rails projects had 100% test coverage, and refactoring was a matter of course." Somehow, I (somebody with zero Ruby experience, and very little web dev experience) had ended up with the same impression. That certainly is some good evangelism.

mechanical_fish 15y ago

Again, it's about maturity. Every popular young platform has a relatively large amount of evangelical fervor and a relatively small amount of real-world long-term experience. Java was no different, years ago.

kd1220 15y ago
The two Rails programmers I've met didn't know Ruby itself very well. Also both had to bow out of their contract jobs because neither could build a functioning CMS in less than a year. When I talked to them it sounded like they were kicking ass and getting things done, but they were just vomiting buzzwords apparently. When I started using PHP ten years ago, I inherited an existing project. Two days into it I thought to myself: "PHP is kind of like Perl, but less useful." I guess I missed the PHP hype phase. If it had one. I've never been a language evangelist. I just solve problems with whatever technology is most appropriate for the case.

avdi 15y ago

The striving is the key. Keep it up!

epochwolf 15y ago

I deal with this at work. The code has never been refactored. There are unit tests for some areas but the views and controllers have so many lines of code and so many unneeded branches that attempting a test there is near impossible now. As soon as I came to the team I've managed to accomplish two minoir refactoring jobs in small areas of the code. I've pitched a more major refactor to the team and now we just need to get it passed our manager. My own projects generally lack extensive testing (and the code lacks complex code paths) but I refactor heavily.

SoftwareMaven 15y ago
How can you refactor heavily with minimal unit tests? How do you ensure you aren't breaking things?
- epochwolf 15y ago
  Because there is very little code that's affected. Most parts of my app are largely isolated.

angelbob 15y ago

I taught myself Ruby and Rails on my couch, by myself, over years. But I did it after a more-than-ten-year C/C++ career. I continued to be amazed and nonplussed that a community could do so well and know so many technologies so fluently when I took so long to learn them. And now that I've met a bunch of Rails people in person and am considered a Rails guru by two consecutive companies, I'll tell you that yeah, it's mostly hype. Not that Rails is bad -- it rocks. But it requires a lot of background in deep, messy Ruby to really do well, and there's a lot of bad Ruby and Rails code out there. How could it be otherwise?