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> They don’t teach rails at uni. So straight off the bat it eliminates that large segment of people inspired by the dot-com bubble to get IT degrees to earn goo

by bdg 15y ago

> They don’t teach rails at uni. So straight off the bat it eliminates that large segment of people inspired by the dot-com bubble to get IT degrees to earn good bucks. Java and .NET developers are a dime a dozen. Also the barrier to entry with learning rails is a little tricky. PHP by comparison is fairly easy to get up and running. Some view this in the negative, or as arrogant elitism. I tend to think the high barrier to entry is innocuous and unintentionally weeds out those who arn’t committed to their craft. Is there not a single rails developer who isn't totally full of themselves? It's a programming language. It's not magic, and rails doesn't mean you're a good programmer. I'm more and more frustrated every time I read stuff like this. When I was learning Rails I was berated with tutorials that made statements like "Rails is a whole new way of thinking" or "Rails means you don't have to work with cruft like braces!!". It's like being the apple fan-boy for a programming language. "Oh it's amazing and everything else means you're not committed to the craft". I don't hate Ruby or the Rails framework, but I do hate this attitude that I see proliferated through the vast majority of people I speak to who use Rails.

jgw 15y ago
I was a bit perplexed by this, too. I live on the other side of the hardware-software divide (I'm an ASIC guy), so I don't really know in-depth about Ruby or Rails. My impression, though, is that Ruby is a great, expressive language, while Rails is essentially a DSL on top of it that lets you very quickly build web apps without actually dealing with a lot of Ruby. That, in fact, many Rails developers tend to have a bit of a reputation of not being good programmers because many don't know the underlying language well. Is there some truth to that, or have I come away with the wrong impression?
- shareme 15y ago
  read Zed Shaw for his take on that
  - jamesmarc 15y ago
    Most entertaining quote: "This is exactly what makes Rails a ghetto. A bunch of half-trained former PHP morons who never bother to sit down and really learn the computer science they were too good to study in college."
    - RegEx 15y ago
      Ouch, I felt that. I need to whip out the textbook of the algorithm analysis course I dropped out of to make the hurt go away.
- ejames 15y ago
  It's hard to make accurate, general statements about a group. It's also hard to tell good programmers from bad programmers. So it's very hard to say whether Rails programmers in general are good or bad. I can tell you, however, that it's quite common for Rails programmers to not know much about Ruby except for the parts used by Rails. In the U.S., Ruby was popularized by Rails, and very few programmers learned the language separate from Rails. I'm unusual in that I picked up Ruby first (while visiting Japan) and learned Rails much later. Rails is much more than a DSL - I would call it a framework, which includes several DSLs as sub-components - but for a pretty broad range of the complexity of your web application, you spend more time and code dealing with Rails library functions and DSLs than with 'pure' Ruby. In most cases, that's the point - Rails is useful precisely because it gives you library functions, DSLs, and middleware components that deal with common web app issues. Rails is a good framework precisely because you can use the framework instead of building things from scratch in pure Ruby. Because of those factors, many Rails programmers don't know the underlying language of Ruby or understand it very well, and I think it's accurate to say that a common mistake made by Rails programmers is to misapply Rails-style conventions in other projects. Rails programmers do have a reputation, in some places, of not being good programmers. (Whether the reputation is entirely accurate is another issue.) I think the most common specific complaint I've heard is that Rails devs don't know SQL because ActiveRecord does it for them.
  - Toenex 15y ago
    Yes I find it odd that someone would limit their own description not just to a single programming language, but a language-framework combination. I much prefer to employ handymen who know how to use both a hammer and a screwdriver, if not all the tools they need.
  - jgw 15y ago
    Thanks for the insight. I guess what I was really getting at is the folks who know Rails, but not Ruby. If you don't know the language underlying your own framework, it seems unlikely that you'll know much else, language-wise (like C, for instance). I'd be loathe to call someone who doesn't really know any programming language a programmer at all. It almost seems like the arrogance alluded to by many posters in this thread comes from using a framework that is itself perhaps a work of genius, as if that somehow implies that merely using it is genius, too. The other thing that surprised me in that post was "the barrier to entry with learning rails is a little tricky". In the context of all the flak that the "Java schools" (which seems to be all of them, now) get for not weeding out weak programmers, I would have guessed that learning Rails would be even easier. Comparison to PHP doesn't seem like a very good yardstick for aptitude.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
to3m 15y ago
Same as with anything else, really - if they knew what they were doing, they wouldn't be so starry-eyed about it...
marcusf 15y ago
I am sincerely wishing that there were multiple upvotes to dish out. My little brother, at 16 and new to hacking, turns out Rails apps like nothing. It's part of the charm of a framework that is so easy to get started with. What's wrong with embracing that instead of trying to wear some sort of 'I do rails, thus I am the 1%'-badge?
benihana 15y ago
I mean, the guy has a huge banner with a picture of himself on every page of his website. He seems to think that developers who are into music creation are unique to Rails (it's been my experience that there's a high correlation between programming and enjoying creating and playing music). He seems to be the stereotypical Rails developer - arrogant, full of himself, convinced he's one of the normal, cool guys who programs and that people who use other technologies, like .Net or Java (who are a dime a dozen) are just dorks with no style. I'm sure there are plenty of Rails developers who are good people, they're just eclipsed by guys like this shouting about how awesome everything they touch is.
- gaius 15y ago
  Yeah, "brogrammers". They don't know what they don't know, and they sure are proud of that.
  - jgw 15y ago
    I had never heard that term before you introduced me to it a couple of weeks ago, but that was the first word that popped into my mind when I opened the article.
    - gaius 15y ago
      They're like guys who microwave a ready-meal, then strut about like they're Gordon Ramsey.
    - Zimahl 15y ago
      To educate you on brogrammers: http://www.quora.com/Brogramming/How-does-a-programmer-become-a-brogrammer http://www.quora.com/Brogramming/How-does-a-programmer-becom... http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Qi_AAqi0RZM http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Q...
- bithive123 15y ago
  Precisely. The good people tend to be a silent constituency because they have better things to do than carry the "humble Rails developers exist" banner through the average discussion thread. HN seems to link to a lot of these blogs where the author breathlessly shares some sophomoric musing demonstrating more arrogance than insight. A few people with nothing better to do post critical comments while dozens of others cheer "right on, I'm liquidating my savings to do my <adjective> start-up too, stay strong brother". The rest of us have just finished our coffee and have work to do today.
EnderMB 15y ago
The line that really got me was ".NET developers are a dime a dozen". If this were true my current employer wouldn't have spent the last six months trying to find a good senior-level ASP.NET developer.
- kamjam 15y ago
  I agree with you, we went through the same thing at work. Developers may be dime a doze, but good developers are difficult to find. On the flip side of this, there's a good reason .Net developers are dime a dozen - .Net jobs are dime a dozen. It gives us variety and the ability to find another job quickly. Also, I've found many times that the reason employers use technology like .Net and Java is that they have a bigger pool of candidates to pick from.
trustfundbaby 15y ago
>I don't hate Ruby or the Rails framework, but I do hate this attitude that I see proliferated through the vast majority of people I speak to who use Rails. I'm sorry you feel this way, and to be honest, it was exactly what kept me away from getting on rails when I first heard about it in 2005. The attitude was a massive turnoff and it took me 2 years to get over it and finally start using Rails (I discovered how many of my problems it solved). I'm a Ruby/Rails dev who's done ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, Coldfusion, Perl with C++, Assembly and Java in College, and my experience is that ... across the board with programming languages or frameworks, the brightest guys are also usually the most humble. If a person exudes a superior OR condescending attitude about a particular framework or language, especially if that is the only one they use, I generally just ignore them. I think you should too. I find (and this is a massive overgeneralization, so beware) that people like this aren't very flexible thinkers, prone to dogma and group think. By filtering this way, you can actually zero in on the people that have something valuable to add to your life as a dev. Just my 2c.
achompas 15y ago
Agreed. More incorrect: Java developers who really know Java well are most definitely not a dime a dozen. It's one thing to create a HelloWorldClass in Java. But I hear that understanding typing or concurrency in Java is much harder than learning a DSL or web framework like Rails. That's the type of stuff they gloss over at uni, from what other devs (I don't know Java, and have a basic understanding of {in/co/contra}variance) tell me. I've seen this a lot in 2012 with the proliferation of Code Year and "learning to code" resolutions, but let me state: printing "Hello, world" to stdout doesn't mean you've learned a language.
alinajaf 15y ago
> Is there not a single rails developer who isn't totally full of themselves? Can you give an example? I've only been doing ruby for a while but so far all the ruby developers I've met are hard-working, smart programmers who give a disproportionate amount of the work they do away for free via open sourcing their code.
randomdata 15y ago
> Rails is a whole new way of thinking I think that is fair statement, assuming an older article. Rails was revolutionary in the same way the iPhone was revolutionary. Neither contained anything groundbreaking inside, but the whole package demonstrated a better way to utilize existing technologies. It was a new way of thinking, and in both cases, many vendors followed in that thinking. Or maybe I'm just full of myself...

by bdg 15y ago

jgw 15y ago

I was a bit perplexed by this, too. I live on the other side of the hardware-software divide (I'm an ASIC guy), so I don't really know in-depth about Ruby or Rails. My impression, though, is that Ruby is a great, expressive language, while Rails is essentially a DSL on top of it that lets you very quickly build web apps without actually dealing with a lot of Ruby. That, in fact, many Rails developers tend to have a bit of a reputation of not being good programmers because many don't know the underlying language well. Is there some truth to that, or have I come away with the wrong impression?

shareme 15y ago
read Zed Shaw for his take on that
- jamesmarc 15y ago
  Most entertaining quote: "This is exactly what makes Rails a ghetto. A bunch of half-trained former PHP morons who never bother to sit down and really learn the computer science they were too good to study in college."
  - RegEx 15y ago
    Ouch, I felt that. I need to whip out the textbook of the algorithm analysis course I dropped out of to make the hurt go away.
ejames 15y ago
It's hard to make accurate, general statements about a group. It's also hard to tell good programmers from bad programmers. So it's very hard to say whether Rails programmers in general are good or bad. I can tell you, however, that it's quite common for Rails programmers to not know much about Ruby except for the parts used by Rails. In the U.S., Ruby was popularized by Rails, and very few programmers learned the language separate from Rails. I'm unusual in that I picked up Ruby first (while visiting Japan) and learned Rails much later. Rails is much more than a DSL - I would call it a framework, which includes several DSLs as sub-components - but for a pretty broad range of the complexity of your web application, you spend more time and code dealing with Rails library functions and DSLs than with 'pure' Ruby. In most cases, that's the point - Rails is useful precisely because it gives you library functions, DSLs, and middleware components that deal with common web app issues. Rails is a good framework precisely because you can use the framework instead of building things from scratch in pure Ruby. Because of those factors, many Rails programmers don't know the underlying language of Ruby or understand it very well, and I think it's accurate to say that a common mistake made by Rails programmers is to misapply Rails-style conventions in other projects. Rails programmers do have a reputation, in some places, of not being good programmers. (Whether the reputation is entirely accurate is another issue.) I think the most common specific complaint I've heard is that Rails devs don't know SQL because ActiveRecord does it for them.
- Toenex 15y ago
  Yes I find it odd that someone would limit their own description not just to a single programming language, but a language-framework combination. I much prefer to employ handymen who know how to use both a hammer and a screwdriver, if not all the tools they need.
- jgw 15y ago
  Thanks for the insight. I guess what I was really getting at is the folks who know Rails, but not Ruby. If you don't know the language underlying your own framework, it seems unlikely that you'll know much else, language-wise (like C, for instance). I'd be loathe to call someone who doesn't really know any programming language a programmer at all. It almost seems like the arrogance alluded to by many posters in this thread comes from using a framework that is itself perhaps a work of genius, as if that somehow implies that merely using it is genius, too. The other thing that surprised me in that post was "the barrier to entry with learning rails is a little tricky". In the context of all the flak that the "Java schools" (which seems to be all of them, now) get for not weeding out weak programmers, I would have guessed that learning Rails would be even easier. Comparison to PHP doesn't seem like a very good yardstick for aptitude.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

to3m 15y ago

Same as with anything else, really - if they knew what they were doing, they wouldn't be so starry-eyed about it...

marcusf 15y ago

I am sincerely wishing that there were multiple upvotes to dish out. My little brother, at 16 and new to hacking, turns out Rails apps like nothing. It's part of the charm of a framework that is so easy to get started with. What's wrong with embracing that instead of trying to wear some sort of 'I do rails, thus I am the 1%'-badge?

benihana 15y ago

I mean, the guy has a huge banner with a picture of himself on every page of his website. He seems to think that developers who are into music creation are unique to Rails (it's been my experience that there's a high correlation between programming and enjoying creating and playing music). He seems to be the stereotypical Rails developer - arrogant, full of himself, convinced he's one of the normal, cool guys who programs and that people who use other technologies, like .Net or Java (who are a dime a dozen) are just dorks with no style. I'm sure there are plenty of Rails developers who are good people, they're just eclipsed by guys like this shouting about how awesome everything they touch is.

gaius 15y ago
Yeah, "brogrammers". They don't know what they don't know, and they sure are proud of that.
- jgw 15y ago
  I had never heard that term before you introduced me to it a couple of weeks ago, but that was the first word that popped into my mind when I opened the article.
  - gaius 15y ago
    They're like guys who microwave a ready-meal, then strut about like they're Gordon Ramsey.
  - Zimahl 15y ago
    To educate you on brogrammers: http://www.quora.com/Brogramming/How-does-a-programmer-become-a-brogrammer http://www.quora.com/Brogramming/How-does-a-programmer-becom... http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Qi_AAqi0RZM http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Q...
bithive123 15y ago
Precisely. The good people tend to be a silent constituency because they have better things to do than carry the "humble Rails developers exist" banner through the average discussion thread. HN seems to link to a lot of these blogs where the author breathlessly shares some sophomoric musing demonstrating more arrogance than insight. A few people with nothing better to do post critical comments while dozens of others cheer "right on, I'm liquidating my savings to do my <adjective> start-up too, stay strong brother". The rest of us have just finished our coffee and have work to do today.

EnderMB 15y ago

The line that really got me was ".NET developers are a dime a dozen". If this were true my current employer wouldn't have spent the last six months trying to find a good senior-level ASP.NET developer.

kamjam 15y ago
I agree with you, we went through the same thing at work. Developers may be dime a doze, but good developers are difficult to find. On the flip side of this, there's a good reason .Net developers are dime a dozen - .Net jobs are dime a dozen. It gives us variety and the ability to find another job quickly. Also, I've found many times that the reason employers use technology like .Net and Java is that they have a bigger pool of candidates to pick from.

trustfundbaby 15y ago

>I don't hate Ruby or the Rails framework, but I do hate this attitude that I see proliferated through the vast majority of people I speak to who use Rails. I'm sorry you feel this way, and to be honest, it was exactly what kept me away from getting on rails when I first heard about it in 2005. The attitude was a massive turnoff and it took me 2 years to get over it and finally start using Rails (I discovered how many of my problems it solved). I'm a Ruby/Rails dev who's done ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, Coldfusion, Perl with C++, Assembly and Java in College, and my experience is that ... across the board with programming languages or frameworks, the brightest guys are also usually the most humble. If a person exudes a superior OR condescending attitude about a particular framework or language, especially if that is the only one they use, I generally just ignore them. I think you should too. I find (and this is a massive overgeneralization, so beware) that people like this aren't very flexible thinkers, prone to dogma and group think. By filtering this way, you can actually zero in on the people that have something valuable to add to your life as a dev. Just my 2c.

achompas 15y ago

Agreed. More incorrect: Java developers who really know Java well are most definitely not a dime a dozen. It's one thing to create a HelloWorldClass in Java. But I hear that understanding typing or concurrency in Java is much harder than learning a DSL or web framework like Rails. That's the type of stuff they gloss over at uni, from what other devs (I don't know Java, and have a basic understanding of {in/co/contra}variance) tell me. I've seen this a lot in 2012 with the proliferation of Code Year and "learning to code" resolutions, but let me state: printing "Hello, world" to stdout doesn't mean you've learned a language.

alinajaf 15y ago

> Is there not a single rails developer who isn't totally full of themselves? Can you give an example? I've only been doing ruby for a while but so far all the ruby developers I've met are hard-working, smart programmers who give a disproportionate amount of the work they do away for free via open sourcing their code.

randomdata 15y ago

> Rails is a whole new way of thinking I think that is fair statement, assuming an older article. Rails was revolutionary in the same way the iPhone was revolutionary. Neither contained anything groundbreaking inside, but the whole package demonstrated a better way to utilize existing technologies. It was a new way of thinking, and in both cases, many vendors followed in that thinking. Or maybe I'm just full of myself...