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We seem to have different ideas of progress. To my eye Rails is picking up bloat like there's no tomorrow and happily adopting questionable decisions like the a
by moe 15y ago
We seem to have different ideas of progress. To my eye Rails is picking up bloat like there's no tomorrow and happily adopting questionable decisions like the above. Meanwhile fundamental issues remain largely unaddressed.
There's still serious performance regressions.
The asset pipeline is still sort of a trainwreck.
There's still no automation for schema migrations (perhaps hobo fields will finally bring some relief for those who adopt it).
They still don't seem to have realized that code generators are a no-go.
I see zero efforts towards modernizing the bloated routing and MVC cruft to accomodate modern fat-clients (and imho the "resources"-magic was a terrible idea from the start even for regular apps).
The whole thing is still riddled with ungodly amounts of magic that likes to break in unpredictable ways (my pet bug: the monkey-patch to really suppress browser stack-traces in production changes about every 3 months and it's worrying such a bug was deliberately created in first place).
I could go on for a while...
</rant>
- fxn 15y agoPatches welcome!
- malandrew 15y agoI think the problem is beyond being solvable by patches, but an issue of philosophical introspection of where Rails wants to be in a few years. To be able to change the direction of Rails on this issue and the other issues the poster above raised, I'd have to spend a significant amount of time submitting patches and get to the point where I am a major committer to have the opportunity to chime in and have a significant impact on the direction Rails is going. Even if I or someone else with the same concerns were committed to making that effort, by the time I or they get to the point where we can have an impact, it will be too late. I'd rather commit to a node or an npm package than rails because any package I commit to will hopefully be replaced by something better once it's outlived its usefulness. My favorite part about node is that it isn't opinionated. It leaves the opinion to the community modules. Hopefully most community modules with maintain just the right amount of opinion about their domain and know when to concede matters of opinion to other modules that node better. It's nice when separation of concerns is a cultural value. This isn't a node/rails debate. It's a values debate. I think opinion was the right value for the right time several years ago. We're going through a time of change where opinion is a liability not an asset.
- homosaur 15y agoDoes this mean it's time to fork?
- virmundi 15y agoThis is a horrible issue with modern development. Basically we are getting into sectarianism. Don't like a doctrine of the Brethren Church? Fork and become the Grace Brethren. Don't like a small doctrine of the Grace Brethren? Fork and make the Conservative Grace Brethren. I know that GIT and the like have made it really easy to fork and run, but does this fundamentally help? Does having X versions of some framework really make sense? Why not go a different route and just give up the one side and make another? Rather than forking, make something new.
- homosaur 15y agoYeah, I actually think that's the way to go if you don't like Rails, I was kind of joking. I am curious to see if there's enough passion for Rails itself that people would say, "no I want RAILS, even if it means making it something else" rather than just accepting a change in philosophy or moving to something else. Personally, I think there's not. I think people either are sticking to Rails or they are not. I think even if you don't like the new Rails, it did help the development community at large. Before Rails, I don't know many web folks who were talking about TDD and MVC and real, honest, programming stuff.
- dlitz 15y ago> I know that GIT and the like have made it really easy to fork and run, but does this fundamentally help? Yes, it does. What ends up happening in practice is that forks are almost always short-lived. They either get merged with the mainline, they become the new mainline, or they die out. Occasionally, there are two self-sustaining projects that diverge from the same point of origin, but it's rare.
- malandrew 15y agoNaw, if you work with Ruby, I'd just work on creating an ecosystem of interchangeable parts around Sinatra.
- rohitarondekar 15y agoIt's unfortunate that this being down voted. Because he means it sincerely.
- eta_carinae 15y agoThe "If you're not happy submit a patch or shut up" is exactly the arrogant and absurd attitude that kills open source projects.
- cheald 15y agoNo, "I'm not happy and it's your job to fix it" is exactly the arrogant and absurd attitude that kills open source projects.
- Confusion 15y agoDownvoted you both. Both attitudes are neither arrogant nor absurd. They just stem from different expectations and beliefs. These kind of statements aren't going to convince anyone. Explain why they are wrong. 'Being arrogant' is not an explanation: it's an accusation, that'll immediately get the other on the defensive.
- nknight 15y agoIf you really need an explanation for why slavery is wrong, I think you're beyond reasoning with.
- Confusion 15y agoI don't understand your comment. Are you suggesting one side of the above argument implicitly condones slavery? Or do you feel that my argument is invalid, because it could equally apply to a discussion about slavery in which people resort to name calling?
- nknight 15y agoNow you're just being deliberately obtuse. Nobody needs to be told that demanding unpaid labor of open-source contributors is condoning slavery, and nobody is owed an explanation of why unless they're a small child or mentally handicapped.
- eta_carinae 15y agoThe "If you're not happy submit a patch or shut up" response is exactly the arrogant and absurd attitude that kills open source projects.
- Confusion 15y agoThe question is whether the patches would be accepted. There are still people in charge. When they make a choice to go route A and you say: I have a great patch to make route B work, they are not going to take it. Secondly, if you disagree with an architectural decision, you can't be expected to make the chosen architecture work. Especially not if your patch may be rejected anyway. The number of patches that get rejected is staggering. Practice shows that 'patches welcome' is just not true.
- apsurd 15y agore: asset pipeline It's beyond me why rails thinks it should dictate how to write/manage/package javascript. As a newbie-ish javascript developer I am continually learning from great projects like requirejs, enderjs, nodejs, commonjs (AMD in general), backbonejs, etc. How arrogant do rails programmers have to be to dip their hand into javascript best practices? Honest question, because the better I get at programming the more I feel like rails is less necessary.
- Fluxx 15y agoThey're not dictating how you use JS, best practices, or anything like that, it's simply a pipeline for compressing and delivering assets. You also don't have to use it if you don't want to. There is a "config.assets.enabled" option in application.rb that you can set to "false" to turn it off. Bottom line is Rails is, and always has been, and opinionated framework, which you choose to buy in to. And even in recent years they've been better about letting you opt out of certain parts of it.
- rohitarondekar 15y agoWhy is this being down voted? It's true.
- grabastic 15y agoHow do you minify and concatenate your files in your projects? Part of a deploy/build script? Commit hooks? Manually? Do you do it at all? What about compiling Sass and CoffeeScript? The asset pipeline is not arrogance it's convenience. If you have a better system for those tasks then you shouldn't use the pipeline, but for a lot of people the asset pipeline saves time and results in a faster, better experience for their end users.