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I just can’t bring myself to get worked up about it - I’ve done a lot of Rails, and I’ve done a lot of pure Ruby. You quite quickly learn which bits come from A

I just can’t bring myself to get worked up about it - I’ve done a lot of Rails, and I’ve done a lot of pure Ruby. You quite quickly learn which bits come from ActiveSupport when you step outside Rails because… it doesn’t work. It’s not going to trip you up in 8 month’s time after shipping your code, you’re just going to get an exception when you first try to run it, and then either implement it the pure way or add a dependency on ActiveSupport.

steve_adams_86 5y ago
Those are good points. I should say it's not really ActiveSupport that concerned me the most so much as the possibility of other people on my team monkey patching stuff in a similar way, but with much lower quality code. It's almost like all the common dangers of bad programming exist, plus a bunch more at a lower level. I totally recognize that it's also a strength of ruby. I really enjoyed working with it. It's super expressive and clear to read. ActiveSupport is all really well documented and designed too, and I'm not trying to criticize it. After re-reading my comment I'm noticing I was specifically targeting Rails as well. I think if anything Rails does a great job and shows why this is a cool thing about ruby. I think what I should have said is that this aspect of ruby is what I found off-putting and specifically in a context where I'm relying on a vast number of dependencies, coworkers of various skill levels, and shipping code to customers. Does that make more sense? I didn't express what I was thinking very well before.