3 ms·

Until metaprogramming, autoloading, DSLs and everything that eventually makes Ruby code unreadable takes place due to personal preferences. Ruby is clever, it

by piva00 4y ago

Until metaprogramming, autoloading, DSLs and everything that eventually makes Ruby code unreadable takes place due to personal preferences. Ruby is clever, it can be beautiful, but I've never seen a good codebase using it grow well without enforcing strictly opinionated ways of writing it to ensure maintainability. Which breaks a lot of the expectations of some Ruby developers that chose the language because they like to write it in their own way.

projectazorian 4y ago
> Ruby is clever, it can be beautiful, but I've never seen a good codebase using it grow well without enforcing strictly opinionated ways of writing it to ensure maintainability. Which breaks a lot of the expectations of some Ruby developers that chose the language because they like to write it in their own way. Yeah, this is one of the major disadvantages of Ruby. Every Ruby shop of any size has its own idioms and internal code style, which means a lot of unnecessary overhead when onboarding new people. Even experienced devs need to take some time to feel out their team's norms. The expressiveness also lends itself to bike shedding - I've seen many a PR comment questioning why a dev chose method A versus method B, where method B is an alias of method A. Probably an hour of staff time spent on something that has zero impact on functionality, maintainability, or performance.
drewcoo 4y ago
> without enforcing strictly opinionated ways of writing it to ensure maintainability But a team cannot have its own opinions with Python. They're already built in.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  A team can absolutely have its own opinions about Python. “There should be one— and preferably only one —obvious way to do it” from the Zen is very much aspirational, rather than a declaration of an immutable truth about Python and it's ecosystem.
hzhou321 4y ago
> Ruby is clever, it can be beautiful, but I've never seen a good codebase using it grow well without enforcing strictly opinionated ways of writing it to ensure maintainability. I believe every good maintainable software needs an enforcing strictly opinionated ways of writing it to ensure maintainability. Language need be general to be useful. Any language can create utterly unmaintainable code. If you shift "opinionated" into the language, it is less easy to write unmaintainable code, but it is also more difficult to write fitting maintainable code because that "opinionated" opinion may not best fit (and usually can't best fit) a specific application, a specific team, and a specific set of experience. On the other hand, if we shift "opinionated" to the programmer, the language inevitably need add more meta-programming ability or simply more ways to do the same/similar thing. The code can easily become unmaintainable under less experienced programmers who are not opinionated and aren't disciplined. The current programming culture expect programmers to be commodities, thus favors opinionated languages and idiomatic code. I can easily imagine a shift in culture that favors experienced and opinionated and disciplined programmers, where different set of languages will be favored. Today's software, once grow to certain size, are all quite unmaintainable.

by piva00 4y ago

projectazorian 4y ago

> Ruby is clever, it can be beautiful, but I've never seen a good codebase using it grow well without enforcing strictly opinionated ways of writing it to ensure maintainability. Which breaks a lot of the expectations of some Ruby developers that chose the language because they like to write it in their own way. Yeah, this is one of the major disadvantages of Ruby. Every Ruby shop of any size has its own idioms and internal code style, which means a lot of unnecessary overhead when onboarding new people. Even experienced devs need to take some time to feel out their team's norms. The expressiveness also lends itself to bike shedding - I've seen many a PR comment questioning why a dev chose method A versus method B, where method B is an alias of method A. Probably an hour of staff time spent on something that has zero impact on functionality, maintainability, or performance.

drewcoo 4y ago

> without enforcing strictly opinionated ways of writing it to ensure maintainability But a team cannot have its own opinions with Python. They're already built in.

dragonwriter 4y ago
A team can absolutely have its own opinions about Python. “There should be one— and preferably only one —obvious way to do it” from the Zen is very much aspirational, rather than a declaration of an immutable truth about Python and it's ecosystem.

hzhou321 4y ago

> Ruby is clever, it can be beautiful, but I've never seen a good codebase using it grow well without enforcing strictly opinionated ways of writing it to ensure maintainability. I believe every good maintainable software needs an enforcing strictly opinionated ways of writing it to ensure maintainability. Language need be general to be useful. Any language can create utterly unmaintainable code. If you shift "opinionated" into the language, it is less easy to write unmaintainable code, but it is also more difficult to write fitting maintainable code because that "opinionated" opinion may not best fit (and usually can't best fit) a specific application, a specific team, and a specific set of experience. On the other hand, if we shift "opinionated" to the programmer, the language inevitably need add more meta-programming ability or simply more ways to do the same/similar thing. The code can easily become unmaintainable under less experienced programmers who are not opinionated and aren't disciplined. The current programming culture expect programmers to be commodities, thus favors opinionated languages and idiomatic code. I can easily imagine a shift in culture that favors experienced and opinionated and disciplined programmers, where different set of languages will be favored. Today's software, once grow to certain size, are all quite unmaintainable.