6 ms·

There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding about what "beginner" means for Rails. I've been a .NET developer for over 10 years. I'm a Rails "beginner". I

by toast76 15y ago

There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding about what "beginner" means for Rails. I've been a .NET developer for over 10 years. I'm a Rails "beginner". I'd say I'm comfortable with web technology, and yet Rails was an absolute nightmare for me to get started with. If the Rails community wants people like me to stop doing what they were doing and use Rails instead, it MUST be easier to get started with.

rbanffy 15y ago
I've observed that veterans in tool A frequently have huge problems when they try to get around the very different tool B. This, and not Rails, could be the cause of the problems you are experiencing. Every time I have to maintain a Java web app, for instance, I suffer. My experience with Django and Plone, more often than not, makes everything much more painful than it would be were I more comfortable with, say, ASP.NET.
- mattbriggs 15y ago
  I think the biggest thing is if that learning a complex framework is hard enough, but people often just assume that their expertise in a c-like static language is immediately transferable to anything else. If you have no experience in a dynamic or functional language and want to pick something up in that area, the first thing you have to learn is how people approach problems in that different paradigm, followed by gaining a level of competence with the syntax/libraries before they can even start learning the framework.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    I think it's actually worse than that - there's a lot to unlearn in order to be effective with tools like Rails. It's like approaching Smalltalk and asking where's the source code.
gnaritas 15y ago
> I've been a .NET developer for over 10 years. Me too, and I just started using Rails in the last few weeks and am finding it a joy to work with. Way better than .Net. How exactly is it a nightmare?
- toast76 15y ago
  USING Rails is a breeze. Getting it INSTALLED is the nightmare. One expects a learning curve starting any new language, but I prefer that to start AFTER I've got it installed.
  - dysoco 15y ago
    sudo pacman -S ruby && sudo gem install rails I installed it that way, wasn't difficult at all.
    - Deinumite 15y ago
      Good ole arch linux. At least you have a shot at current packages. As for Ubuntu, it's a sad state. Installing ruby-rvm and/or rubygems from the the repositories can break your whole system.
  - mattbriggs 15y ago
    http://railsinstaller.org/ http://railsinstaller.org/ ? in general, windows support in the ruby world is sort of a third class citizen, but I had thought rails installation was a solved problem
    - toast76 15y ago
      When i ditched .NET I went OSX :)
oblique63 15y ago
I just got hired for a gig as a rails developer, and I feel your pain. I got hired because I primarily work with python, and have good experience with Django, flask and the like, but I had never really touched rails. From the various comments I'd heard, I figured it would be a simple transition, but man has it been annoying. Just setting up their dev environment took almost an entire 8-hour day, and I was one of the 'faster ones'. Not to mention that having to deal with rails legacy code, you quickly realize that despite the original developer's best efforts, the whole magical+'convention over configuration' aspect of rails just totally goes against the concept of 'self-documenting code'. Compound that with the fragile version requirements of both Ruby and Rails, and you have a recipe for frustration. Out of any given search I perform, about a third of the 'relevant' results are for incompatible versions of rails, making it hard to find anything reliable outside the official docs (which leave a bit to be desired). I may just be spoiled by the relatively conservative + documentation-heavy nature of most of the python frameworks I've worked with, but considering the popularity of rails (even amongst non-developers), I guess I just expected the barrier to entry to be a bit lower...
- mattbriggs 15y ago
  Can you give more details? Bundler gives very strong versioning of dependancies, I find railstutorial.org, railsguides, and the api docs to be pretty complete, and "convention over configuration" means things like your models are singular names of your tables, and if you do something like "belongs_to :other_model" it expects an "other_model_id" field by default, and will link to to a class called OtherModel. It is the sort of thing that can be a pain if you don't know it, but can be learned quite easily, especially if you have more experienced folks your working with. I learned rails and django at about the same time, and I never understood the praise of the django docs. Both projects have above average documentation for open source projects, but if anything I find the rails docs are far more consistently up to date compared to django. Both have helpful and active communities though (which is far more important imo), and I never really had that hard of a time figuring something out. I think rails has a "For Noobs" reputation with people who have never used it, but as someone who didn't really have any preconceptions going in, I find this "rails 3 is hard" thing really hard to understand.
bad_user 15y ago
I'm a Python/Django and Ruby/Rails developer and getting started with ASP.NET MVC was difficult ... I won't say nightmare, simply because I reserve that word for real nightmares and learning a new framework is not one. So if the .NET community wants people like me to stop doing what they are doing and use ASP.NET instead, it MUST be easier to get started with. And no, I don't want to develop on top of Windows or Visual Studio. Start from there.

by toast76 15y ago

rbanffy 15y ago

I've observed that veterans in tool A frequently have huge problems when they try to get around the very different tool B. This, and not Rails, could be the cause of the problems you are experiencing. Every time I have to maintain a Java web app, for instance, I suffer. My experience with Django and Plone, more often than not, makes everything much more painful than it would be were I more comfortable with, say, ASP.NET.

mattbriggs 15y ago
I think the biggest thing is if that learning a complex framework is hard enough, but people often just assume that their expertise in a c-like static language is immediately transferable to anything else. If you have no experience in a dynamic or functional language and want to pick something up in that area, the first thing you have to learn is how people approach problems in that different paradigm, followed by gaining a level of competence with the syntax/libraries before they can even start learning the framework.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  I think it's actually worse than that - there's a lot to unlearn in order to be effective with tools like Rails. It's like approaching Smalltalk and asking where's the source code.

gnaritas 15y ago

> I've been a .NET developer for over 10 years. Me too, and I just started using Rails in the last few weeks and am finding it a joy to work with. Way better than .Net. How exactly is it a nightmare?

toast76 15y ago
USING Rails is a breeze. Getting it INSTALLED is the nightmare. One expects a learning curve starting any new language, but I prefer that to start AFTER I've got it installed.
- dysoco 15y ago
  sudo pacman -S ruby && sudo gem install rails I installed it that way, wasn't difficult at all.
  - Deinumite 15y ago
    Good ole arch linux. At least you have a shot at current packages. As for Ubuntu, it's a sad state. Installing ruby-rvm and/or rubygems from the the repositories can break your whole system.
- mattbriggs 15y ago
  http://railsinstaller.org/ http://railsinstaller.org/ ? in general, windows support in the ruby world is sort of a third class citizen, but I had thought rails installation was a solved problem
  - toast76 15y ago
    When i ditched .NET I went OSX :)

oblique63 15y ago

I just got hired for a gig as a rails developer, and I feel your pain. I got hired because I primarily work with python, and have good experience with Django, flask and the like, but I had never really touched rails. From the various comments I'd heard, I figured it would be a simple transition, but man has it been annoying. Just setting up their dev environment took almost an entire 8-hour day, and I was one of the 'faster ones'. Not to mention that having to deal with rails legacy code, you quickly realize that despite the original developer's best efforts, the whole magical+'convention over configuration' aspect of rails just totally goes against the concept of 'self-documenting code'. Compound that with the fragile version requirements of both Ruby and Rails, and you have a recipe for frustration. Out of any given search I perform, about a third of the 'relevant' results are for incompatible versions of rails, making it hard to find anything reliable outside the official docs (which leave a bit to be desired). I may just be spoiled by the relatively conservative + documentation-heavy nature of most of the python frameworks I've worked with, but considering the popularity of rails (even amongst non-developers), I guess I just expected the barrier to entry to be a bit lower...

mattbriggs 15y ago
Can you give more details? Bundler gives very strong versioning of dependancies, I find railstutorial.org, railsguides, and the api docs to be pretty complete, and "convention over configuration" means things like your models are singular names of your tables, and if you do something like "belongs_to :other_model" it expects an "other_model_id" field by default, and will link to to a class called OtherModel. It is the sort of thing that can be a pain if you don't know it, but can be learned quite easily, especially if you have more experienced folks your working with. I learned rails and django at about the same time, and I never understood the praise of the django docs. Both projects have above average documentation for open source projects, but if anything I find the rails docs are far more consistently up to date compared to django. Both have helpful and active communities though (which is far more important imo), and I never really had that hard of a time figuring something out. I think rails has a "For Noobs" reputation with people who have never used it, but as someone who didn't really have any preconceptions going in, I find this "rails 3 is hard" thing really hard to understand.

bad_user 15y ago

I'm a Python/Django and Ruby/Rails developer and getting started with ASP.NET MVC was difficult ... I won't say nightmare, simply because I reserve that word for real nightmares and learning a new framework is not one. So if the .NET community wants people like me to stop doing what they are doing and use ASP.NET instead, it MUST be easier to get started with. And no, I don't want to develop on top of Windows or Visual Studio. Start from there.