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Serious question from Python-land, that I think may illuminate the difference in mindset. Why are Rails people so obsessed with accelerating the trivial? I me

Serious question from Python-land, that I think may illuminate the difference in mindset. Why are Rails people so obsessed with accelerating the trivial? I mean, the other end of the spectrum is to be focused purely on the obscure and utterly advanced, like category theorists trying to harness Haskell. I've always felt the strength of the Python community is that it was able to let the idioms and cleanliness of Python stand for themselves while they advance of the state of the art for the work-a-day programmer. (The middle of the proverbial road) Meanwhile, we've got Rails (and I mean this separately of Ruby. The non-Rails Ruby community is much more like the rest of us) at one end of the spectrum, and Haskell/Clean/etc. at the other. What the hell?

localhost3000 14y ago
'...web framework that's optimized for programmer happiness...' says it all right there, doesn't it? You know what makes me a happy programmer? Building things, not mucking about with setting up a new dev environment (and filling my machine with crap) every time I hop on a new client project. Make the 'trivial' shit go away so I can focus on the fun/interesting/creative/productive stuff...sounds good to me. I'm very interested in a product like this where I can configure on the fly and keep my machine uncluttered. (seriously, it just feels gross to have 6 different versions of rails and 4 different rubies installed on my machine, even if RVM makes it kinda easy)
- johnbender 14y ago
  Shameless plug here but Vagrant was originally built to address the issue of swapping environments between projects. http://vagrantup.com http://vagrantup.com I believe Mitchell is going to talk to the action.io folks about possible collaboration.
- heretohelp 14y ago
  I have that already with my stack, I'm not sure you understood me.
Argorak 14y ago
This is their first iteration. For a simple Rails app, setting up Ubuntu an RDBMS and Redis is trivial, thats true. The point is that managing 5 Rails apps, one on Mysql, two on Postgres, two on CouchDB, one with Redis, one with Memcached... (and so on so forth) gets non-trivial soon if you don't grow beyond managing it all on your development machine.[1] Suddenly, all that trivial development stuff becomes a question of configuration management. What the Ruby community understands is that trivial things can pile up into something non-trivial. This is why Heroku solves a trivial problem (deploying a process on some defined environment using git) and takes it to a big scale. Github does the same for repositories (arguably one of the "trivial" tasks for sysadmins) and provides it for a good amount of money. All those services started in the Ruby community for a reason. We love the mundane, as everything else is based on that. [1] Alternatively, if you are not consulting, multiply the trivial problem by 20 developers and a growing code-base.
- heretohelp 14y ago
  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4135058 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4135058 I just got done proselytizing the benefits of automation. I'm not arguing against myself. I'm concerned with why everything Rails people promote and celebrate seems to be along the lines of what originally popularized the framework. "Make a blog in 15 minutes!" --- you remember this one? Were you programming back then? It's exemplary of what I'm talking about. Why are they accelerating the trivial? How many times do you really need to deploy a vanilla Rails app over and over in 1,000 different ways? There's much more to deployment than that, and if that's all your needs are, then there isn't much to say. We should be learning new and advanced ways to manage complexity with Capistrano or Vlad the Deployer or some non-Ruby deployment tool like Puppet, CFEngine, or Chef. Partly because they can help deal with things other than just the Rails app itself, which is the easy part generally speaking.
  - Argorak 14y ago
    > "Make a blog in 15 minutes!" --- you remember this one? Were you programming back then? It's exemplary of what I'm talking about. Actually: Yes. I was even programming Ruby before that, after it won in a flip-coin-contest against Python. :) We might be on the same page here, but with different mindsets: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4138088 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4138088 I am a happy Puppet/Vagrant-user and would give away a substantial amount of money for a build/management/hosting-service for all that. Still, you need a hook, and the (in)famous 15-minute-blog was a tremendous hook, as is a "setup a clean dev env in 2 minutes". Immediate usage is the greatest hook you can get. I remember using frameworks where the setup took hours and was closely bound to the machine you were using unless you built your own tooling on top of the whole thing. Also: there is a lot of stuff around in the Ruby world that can advances the state of the community as you say, even by salvaging Rails. I have not written a Rails App in around 2 years, yet I constantly use parts of it. Rails became a much better community citizen over the last few years. If the 15-minute-hookiness is all you complain about: well, let them have it, if its fun :). I don't care about it a lot, but it is fun to get started.
alinajaf 14y ago
Serious response from Rails-land. Though this project is interesting, it's not really going to make much of a dent in my daily workflow. There is a metric shit-ton of work being put into things that do. Over the past few years: * The Rails queuing API (so you all queuing methods e.g. via Resque or DelayedJob have a common client interface). * The asset pipeline (css/js concatenation + dependency management, plus precompilation for prod). * Profoundly, bundler. I dread doing anything without having bundler there to declare, manage and allow me to browse the code of all my dependencies. So yeah, the stuff that makes the news on HN isn't where the goodies are at in Rails. > I've always felt the strength of the Python community is that it was able to let the idioms and cleanliness of Python stand for themselves while they advance of the state of the art for the work-a-day programmer. :%s /Python/Rails/g<CR>
- heretohelp 14y ago
  Rails volken: Do yourselves a favor, stop promoting stuff like this. It makes you look like Baby's First Web App. I'd seen the Resque/DelayedJob stuff. The equivalent in Python-land are Celery and Carrot. They're probably not much different. >* The asset pipeline (css/js concatenation + dependency management, plus precompilation for prod). Creating defaults for this stuff is definitely cool, but OTOH, it's something we solved at my company with a single bash script ;) >:%s /Python/Rails/g<CR> Vim user. Pffffft. ;) All hail the hypno-Emacs! >it's [action.io] not really going to make much of a dent in my daily workflow I would hope not. I would think most serious programmers have a pretty smooth/fine-tuned pipeline for "save file, run script, see changes in $SERVER(s)"
  - alinajaf 14y ago
    > I'd seen the Resque/DelayedJob stuff. The equivalent in Python-land are Celery and Carrot. They're probably not much different. I'd expect as much. > Creating defaults for this stuff is definitely cool, but OTOH, it's something we solved at my company with a single bash script ; Good for you guys! That's going to be one hell of a bash script though, enjoy maintaining that. > Vim user. Pffffft. ;) All hail the hypno-Emacs! Err, OK.
lominming 14y ago
I am from the Rails-land, but I think what action.io is solving is something that all developers face in general - setting up a local development environment is a pain. Think about it, you cannot easily have multiple Ruby versions in your own local box. Or even having multiple versions of databases in my own local machine is a pain. A lot of people ended up running virtual machines just to have different server configurations. I think action.io does it nicely to solve this problem. I think action.io is going to help a lot in the case of trying out the latest versions of a framework before migration. Want to try out Rails 3.2 + Ruby 1.9 when you are on Rails 2 + Ruby 1.8? I do not have to mess around my local config. I see action.io allowing me to just create a dev environment instantly for me to try out. I see huge benefits in the open-source community tool. There are so many different open-source projects out there, but the last thing I want to do is to spend 30min (or more) messing with my local development environment just to try out and play around with a open source project. Cool stuff man.
- charliesome 14y ago
  > Want to try out Rails 3.2 + Ruby 1.9 when you are on Rails 2 + Ruby 1.8? I do not have to mess around my local config. I see action.io allowing me to just create a dev environment instantly for me to try out. rvm 1.9.3 gem install rails It doesn't get much simpler than that
phillmv 14y ago
>Why are Rails people so obsessed with accelerating the trivial? That's easy. That's a false dichotomy. This isn't a deeply held cultural value. >I've always felt the strength of the Python community is that it was able to let the idioms and cleanliness of Python stand for themselves while they advance of the state of the art for the work-a-day programmer. It is a Ruby cultural value that There's More Than One Way To Do It, and that shiny things are worth chasing. That said, I laugh in the face of your "Python cleanliness".
marcamillion 14y ago
Wow...I can't believe this comment is the first in the thread. HN is not about technical purity...it's about hackers getting shit done. You may think that getting a 'vanilla' Rails App deployed to the cloud and being able to do editing in your browser is trivial - because you have invested a ton of work in your own setup and you are entitled to that. But when did HN become a place where on the thread announcing a major achievement - the shipping of what seems like a damn good product, that may solve a pain point for many people - people are shitting all over it because of some language/community war? Really? I am a Rails developer, sure...I may not have as much experience as you do building web apps or even programming, but anything that removes the friction of me getting a product out the door is perfect. While I can't say I would necessarily pay for this immediately, but I can see it having immense value. As someone that has wrestled with getting Rails setup on various operating systems for people that aren't Rails developers but need access to the source, like a front-end dev that only uses Windows for instance, having something like this is pretty awesome. I can just push my app here and the front-end dev can edit the code in the browser....without having to worry about installing Rails (or even having the app installed) locally. I am sure many other people think that this looks like an awesome product - hence the many upvotes. I just don't understand how this comment got so much attention and how, after scrolling through many replies, I haven't seen someone address this issue. This is HN. Hacker News. For Hackers. By Hackers. Not Ruby land. Not Python land. Not Computer Science land. Sure, we all talk about those stuff. But our #1 focus is on people that get shit done. These guys have done so. Congrats. The product looks kick-ass. I await my trial.
sparknlaunch 14y ago
> Why are Rails people so obsessed with accelerating the trivial? From a Rails beginner perspective... Having spent days trying to get Rails up and running on a Windows box, this product looks absolutely awesome. Even the so called out of the box solutions still needs hours of customization. Every new release of Rails means starting from scratch with limited documentation. Anyone who has struggled with installing Rails on Windows, then finding a decent IDE, installing all the other packages etc etc will appreciate being able to get to that point in 60 seconds via their browser. I am sure some Rails experts and Mac Users may disagree but getting started in Rails takes a lot of effort.

localhost3000 14y ago

'...web framework that's optimized for programmer happiness...' says it all right there, doesn't it? You know what makes me a happy programmer? Building things, not mucking about with setting up a new dev environment (and filling my machine with crap) every time I hop on a new client project. Make the 'trivial' shit go away so I can focus on the fun/interesting/creative/productive stuff...sounds good to me. I'm very interested in a product like this where I can configure on the fly and keep my machine uncluttered. (seriously, it just feels gross to have 6 different versions of rails and 4 different rubies installed on my machine, even if RVM makes it kinda easy)

johnbender 14y ago
Shameless plug here but Vagrant was originally built to address the issue of swapping environments between projects. http://vagrantup.com http://vagrantup.com I believe Mitchell is going to talk to the action.io folks about possible collaboration.
heretohelp 14y ago
I have that already with my stack, I'm not sure you understood me.

Argorak 14y ago

This is their first iteration. For a simple Rails app, setting up Ubuntu an RDBMS and Redis is trivial, thats true. The point is that managing 5 Rails apps, one on Mysql, two on Postgres, two on CouchDB, one with Redis, one with Memcached... (and so on so forth) gets non-trivial soon if you don't grow beyond managing it all on your development machine.[1] Suddenly, all that trivial development stuff becomes a question of configuration management. What the Ruby community understands is that trivial things can pile up into something non-trivial. This is why Heroku solves a trivial problem (deploying a process on some defined environment using git) and takes it to a big scale. Github does the same for repositories (arguably one of the "trivial" tasks for sysadmins) and provides it for a good amount of money. All those services started in the Ruby community for a reason. We love the mundane, as everything else is based on that. [1] Alternatively, if you are not consulting, multiply the trivial problem by 20 developers and a growing code-base.

heretohelp 14y ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4135058 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4135058 I just got done proselytizing the benefits of automation. I'm not arguing against myself. I'm concerned with why everything Rails people promote and celebrate seems to be along the lines of what originally popularized the framework. "Make a blog in 15 minutes!" --- you remember this one? Were you programming back then? It's exemplary of what I'm talking about. Why are they accelerating the trivial? How many times do you really need to deploy a vanilla Rails app over and over in 1,000 different ways? There's much more to deployment than that, and if that's all your needs are, then there isn't much to say. We should be learning new and advanced ways to manage complexity with Capistrano or Vlad the Deployer or some non-Ruby deployment tool like Puppet, CFEngine, or Chef. Partly because they can help deal with things other than just the Rails app itself, which is the easy part generally speaking.
- Argorak 14y ago
  > "Make a blog in 15 minutes!" --- you remember this one? Were you programming back then? It's exemplary of what I'm talking about. Actually: Yes. I was even programming Ruby before that, after it won in a flip-coin-contest against Python. :) We might be on the same page here, but with different mindsets: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4138088 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4138088 I am a happy Puppet/Vagrant-user and would give away a substantial amount of money for a build/management/hosting-service for all that. Still, you need a hook, and the (in)famous 15-minute-blog was a tremendous hook, as is a "setup a clean dev env in 2 minutes". Immediate usage is the greatest hook you can get. I remember using frameworks where the setup took hours and was closely bound to the machine you were using unless you built your own tooling on top of the whole thing. Also: there is a lot of stuff around in the Ruby world that can advances the state of the community as you say, even by salvaging Rails. I have not written a Rails App in around 2 years, yet I constantly use parts of it. Rails became a much better community citizen over the last few years. If the 15-minute-hookiness is all you complain about: well, let them have it, if its fun :). I don't care about it a lot, but it is fun to get started.

alinajaf 14y ago

Serious response from Rails-land. Though this project is interesting, it's not really going to make much of a dent in my daily workflow. There is a metric shit-ton of work being put into things that do. Over the past few years: * The Rails queuing API (so you all queuing methods e.g. via Resque or DelayedJob have a common client interface). * The asset pipeline (css/js concatenation + dependency management, plus precompilation for prod). * Profoundly, bundler. I dread doing anything without having bundler there to declare, manage and allow me to browse the code of all my dependencies. So yeah, the stuff that makes the news on HN isn't where the goodies are at in Rails. > I've always felt the strength of the Python community is that it was able to let the idioms and cleanliness of Python stand for themselves while they advance of the state of the art for the work-a-day programmer. :%s /Python/Rails/g<CR>

heretohelp 14y ago
Rails volken: Do yourselves a favor, stop promoting stuff like this. It makes you look like Baby's First Web App. I'd seen the Resque/DelayedJob stuff. The equivalent in Python-land are Celery and Carrot. They're probably not much different. >* The asset pipeline (css/js concatenation + dependency management, plus precompilation for prod). Creating defaults for this stuff is definitely cool, but OTOH, it's something we solved at my company with a single bash script ;) >:%s /Python/Rails/g<CR> Vim user. Pffffft. ;) All hail the hypno-Emacs! >it's [action.io] not really going to make much of a dent in my daily workflow I would hope not. I would think most serious programmers have a pretty smooth/fine-tuned pipeline for "save file, run script, see changes in $SERVER(s)"
- alinajaf 14y ago
  > I'd seen the Resque/DelayedJob stuff. The equivalent in Python-land are Celery and Carrot. They're probably not much different. I'd expect as much. > Creating defaults for this stuff is definitely cool, but OTOH, it's something we solved at my company with a single bash script ; Good for you guys! That's going to be one hell of a bash script though, enjoy maintaining that. > Vim user. Pffffft. ;) All hail the hypno-Emacs! Err, OK.

lominming 14y ago

I am from the Rails-land, but I think what action.io is solving is something that all developers face in general - setting up a local development environment is a pain. Think about it, you cannot easily have multiple Ruby versions in your own local box. Or even having multiple versions of databases in my own local machine is a pain. A lot of people ended up running virtual machines just to have different server configurations. I think action.io does it nicely to solve this problem. I think action.io is going to help a lot in the case of trying out the latest versions of a framework before migration. Want to try out Rails 3.2 + Ruby 1.9 when you are on Rails 2 + Ruby 1.8? I do not have to mess around my local config. I see action.io allowing me to just create a dev environment instantly for me to try out. I see huge benefits in the open-source community tool. There are so many different open-source projects out there, but the last thing I want to do is to spend 30min (or more) messing with my local development environment just to try out and play around with a open source project. Cool stuff man.

charliesome 14y ago
> Want to try out Rails 3.2 + Ruby 1.9 when you are on Rails 2 + Ruby 1.8? I do not have to mess around my local config. I see action.io allowing me to just create a dev environment instantly for me to try out. rvm 1.9.3 gem install rails It doesn't get much simpler than that

phillmv 14y ago

>Why are Rails people so obsessed with accelerating the trivial? That's easy. That's a false dichotomy. This isn't a deeply held cultural value. >I've always felt the strength of the Python community is that it was able to let the idioms and cleanliness of Python stand for themselves while they advance of the state of the art for the work-a-day programmer. It is a Ruby cultural value that There's More Than One Way To Do It, and that shiny things are worth chasing. That said, I laugh in the face of your "Python cleanliness".

marcamillion 14y ago

Wow...I can't believe this comment is the first in the thread. HN is not about technical purity...it's about hackers getting shit done. You may think that getting a 'vanilla' Rails App deployed to the cloud and being able to do editing in your browser is trivial - because you have invested a ton of work in your own setup and you are entitled to that. But when did HN become a place where on the thread announcing a major achievement - the shipping of what seems like a damn good product, that may solve a pain point for many people - people are shitting all over it because of some language/community war? Really? I am a Rails developer, sure...I may not have as much experience as you do building web apps or even programming, but anything that removes the friction of me getting a product out the door is perfect. While I can't say I would necessarily pay for this immediately, but I can see it having immense value. As someone that has wrestled with getting Rails setup on various operating systems for people that aren't Rails developers but need access to the source, like a front-end dev that only uses Windows for instance, having something like this is pretty awesome. I can just push my app here and the front-end dev can edit the code in the browser....without having to worry about installing Rails (or even having the app installed) locally. I am sure many other people think that this looks like an awesome product - hence the many upvotes. I just don't understand how this comment got so much attention and how, after scrolling through many replies, I haven't seen someone address this issue. This is HN. Hacker News. For Hackers. By Hackers. Not Ruby land. Not Python land. Not Computer Science land. Sure, we all talk about those stuff. But our #1 focus is on people that get shit done. These guys have done so. Congrats. The product looks kick-ass. I await my trial.

sparknlaunch 14y ago

> Why are Rails people so obsessed with accelerating the trivial? From a Rails beginner perspective... Having spent days trying to get Rails up and running on a Windows box, this product looks absolutely awesome. Even the so called out of the box solutions still needs hours of customization. Every new release of Rails means starting from scratch with limited documentation. Anyone who has struggled with installing Rails on Windows, then finding a decent IDE, installing all the other packages etc etc will appreciate being able to get to that point in 60 seconds via their browser. I am sure some Rails experts and Mac Users may disagree but getting started in Rails takes a lot of effort.