6 ms·

I, for one, am not looking forward to an influx of Rails engineers redefining the iOS development culture in their image. The lack of respect for knowledge gai

I, for one, am not looking forward to an influx of Rails engineers redefining the iOS development culture in their image. The lack of respect for knowledge gained over 20+ years of platform development is staggering, but not unexpected. They're rejecting everything from Interface Builder to the standard build tools, and adopting inferior web ideas wholesale -- such as attempting to style native UI with CSS. While it may be par for the course, I'd had hoped that our section of the engineering field would be immune to influence from the Rails community.

jballanc 14y ago
I really don't understand how the world of iOS development has become one of the most cloistered developer communities in recent memory. Is it the gold rush mentality, maybe? Seriously, some of the outright hostility I've seen in the iOS development community is breathtaking. Yes, there is a lot of money to be made in iOS development so, no, you probably don't need to practice community building in order to be successful...today. Regardless, your snide comment about "Rails engineers" reveals your own ignorance on the subject. There are plenty of software engineers that use Ruby but not Rails, and any developer who cannot use Ruby without Rails is unlikely to be of any threat to "redefine iOS development culture", since RubyMotion is not Rails. Edit: Also...since when have "hacker" and "respect for knowledge gained over 20+ years" ever had anything to do with each other? Take the "knowledge gained", evaluate it on its merits, and if you find it lacking, who cares over how many years it was gained?!? If you think you can do better, do so.
- flatline3 14y ago
  > I really don't understand how the world of iOS development has become one of the most cloistered developer communities in recent memory. Is it the gold rush mentality, maybe? You must understand that the iOS development community has its roots in decades of engineering community, coming from NeXT, Mac OS and UNIX traditions. We're simply not interested in the subpar engineering that comes from the inexperienced web developers joining the gold rush. > Edit: Also...since when have "hacker" and "respect for knowledge gained over 20+ years" ever had anything to do with each other? Take the "knowledge gained", evaluate it on its merits, and if you find it lacking, who cares over how many years it was gained?!? If you think you can do better, do so. Which is why we've watched the Rails community re-invent the wheel repeatedly over the past 6 years, consistently rediscovering abandoned methodologies, and then rediscovering why those methodologies were abandoned. One of my favorite examples was the the breathless enthusiasm at the rediscovery of the (inefficient, abandoned) pure pre-fork model: http://tomayko.com/writings/unicorn-is-unix http://tomayko.com/writings/unicorn-is-unix Or, watching the extremely poor architecture of Rails waste vast troves of server CPU and RAM. Or any other of the hundreds (thousands?) examples of junior engineers ignoring history and re-inventing failed architectures that would not have been so broken if they looked at what came before with anything other than disdain.
  - sbarre 14y ago
    > We're simply not interested in the subpar engineering that comes from the inexperienced web developers joining the gold rush. I'm sorry but that's a super douchey thing to say. It's not like there's a limited number of "seats" in the iOS community room, and oh no you wouldn't want to waste some seats on web developers. And who are you to speak for the iOS community? There is room for everyone and anyone to join development communities and contribute as much or as little as they want. No one is forcing you to help anyone out if you think they're not smart or cool enough for your tastes. That's the beauty of all this, everyone is welcome. If you can't see that, you've missed out on some important lessons in your decades of engineering work..
    - flatline3 14y ago
      > That's the beauty of all this, everyone is welcome. If you can't see that, you've missed out on some important lessons in your decades of engineering work.. Not all ideas are equally valid. Socially-driven technology shifts are often not an improvement, yet they can change the industry we all work in. If mobile development is overrun by Rails developers -- and the engineering approaches they promote (often while ignoring history) -- the mobile development community (and the industry) will suffer.
  - jasonwocky 14y ago
    > You must understand that the iOS development community has its roots in decades of engineering community, coming from NeXT, Mac OS and UNIX traditions. I'm sorry, but Fart Apps need not be the exclusive province of "very serious" developers. > Or any other of the hundreds (thousands?) examples of junior engineers ignoring history and re-inventing failed architectures that would not have been so broken if they looked at what came before with anything other than disdain. Maybe. Or perhaps the communication and people skills of the generation that came before them were somewhat lacking.
    - flatline3 14y ago
      > Maybe. Or perhaps the communication and people skills of the generation that came before them were somewhat lacking. Or perhaps we valued substance and were not so easily misled by style. Meanwhile, the bubbles have given inordinate voice to the inexperienced and those lacking substance.
hans_olo 14y ago
Heh, yeah. Look at that company. A 20 years old dude comes with some hipster unproven technology and the boss jumps at it. They are doomed to fail.
- javierhonduco 14y ago
  Every technology gets proven with its use, investing time, great loads of effort, sometimes money, and courage. Last one it's the most important for me :) Btw, did you know any technology that was already proven when it wasn't known? IMHO that's a part of the mainstreaming process, and almost everything we have today has past through it.
- batista 14y ago
  Unproven in what sense? This is not some novel academic concept. It's a Ruby port on the Obj-C runtime. If it builds and runs the app, there is absolutely nothing to be proven. Also, "a 20 years old dude comes with some hipster unproven technology"? Isn't this how Apple for one was founded? Not to mention Yahoo, Google and Facebook...
- cnp 14y ago
  RubyMotion changed the way our entire agency operates: we haven't outsourced a single app in months. It's been the best thing to happen to us, hands down.
  - flatline3 14y ago
    You could have also just learned how to write Objective-C. It'd be more fair to your clients.
    - cnp 14y ago
      How so? These responses are quite simply FUD.
      - flatline3 14y ago
        For the same reason we don't use MonoTouch on client projects; it would creat a maintenance and hiring nightmare for our clients. You jumped on RubyMotion out of laziness or inability to learn something new.
thibaut_barrere 14y ago
Bypassing visual builders in favor of code is not a new idea! It happened as well with .Net and VisualStudio; I used to be a heavy WinForm developer (including visual tools). At some point being able to do everything programmatically proved to be really interesting in my use cases (and on other people projects, too). Not everyone is going to adopt CSS and Pixate, and people are using RubyMotion without Pixate, too. As for the Rails community, pure iOS people are also interested in RubyMotion (based on my exchanges with developers, that is). In the end, there is no such thing as lack of respect or bad influence. New tools get created, people pick what works for them. People using Rails used other platforms before and will use other platforms later. I'll end with an advice to (new?) programmers: don't let fear (of being replaced) choose your skills and tools for you.
- flatline3 14y ago
  > I'll end with an advice to (new?) programmers: don't let fear (of being replaced) choose your skills and tools for you. I'm more concerned about propagation of bad ideas. The current job market and VC climate has given extremely junior engineers a voice grossly disproportionate to their skill, wisdom, or experience. In a more healthy job market, those engineers would be hired into junior positions apprenticed to senior engineers. In the current job market, inexperienced engineers are given carte blanche, and this shifts the industry. Not all shifts are a net positive. It was with great dismay that I observed the rise of the Rails community, and I find it exceedingly disturbing to see their anti-intellectual, anti-experience, anti-computer-science approaches extending outside their initial realm of influence.
batista 14y ago
What exactly have you done in iOS programming to feel so entitled? Seriously, it must be awesome, give us a link maybe? That said, they may lack respect for "knowledge gained over 20+ years of platform development", but you also lack knowledge of the "worse is better" reality and the underlying Unix/Lisp history behind it.
- flatline3 14y ago
  > What exactly have you done in iOS programming to feel so entitled? One of the top-grossing apps with ~$60M/year in revenue. Considerable open-source libraries. A huge number of applications are running my code, even if you discount the code I have in the OS. > That said, they may lack respect for "knowledge gained over 20+ years of platform development", but you also lack knowledge of the "worse is better" reality and the underlying Unix/Lisp history behind it. "Worse is better" doesn't really mean anything. Most of the usage is predicated on false dichotomies and gross over-simplifications, usually revolving around the notion that the opposite of "worse" is nothing at all. Moreover, if any languages/platforms were a poster-boy for the "worse is better" mantra, it would be Apple's platforms. ObjC is high-functioning dinosaur.
  - batista 14y ago
    >One of the top-grossing apps with ~$60M/year in revenue. Considerable open-source libraries. A huge number of applications are running my code, even if you discount the code I have in the OS. Sounds impressive (but, no pointers/links? How to differentiate from some random guy on the interwebs?). But surely with those credentials you don't have any reason to belittle some guy for using RubyMotion for development. Heck, even MacRuby itself was initiated and sponsored by Apple for a couple of years. The most important thing is the end result, not how it was made and if it was messy inside. Heck, OS X _is_ messy inside, and historically it had been much more messy, with a plethora of frameworks for legacy compatibility, a hodgepodge of system apps done with one or the other technology, etc, as you yourself acknowledge. If the app is well thought out, runs fast and does what it says without crashing, the customer could care less with what technology it was made with. You haven't given any proof that an app designed with RubyMotion would be worse off than one designed with Obj-C/Cocoa. It's not like IB is the be all end all of development. People have managed without it. And it's not like Obj-C magically gives more quality to your code compared to Ruby. Most of the "20 years of practices" sound like cargo-cult. A Ruby guy, even a RoR guy, coming to iOS development might have fresh ideas of the kind that an old Obj-C/NeXT veteran might not even be able to comprehend. I haven't seen any innovate iOS apps from NeXT-era Obj-C guys...

jballanc 14y ago

I really don't understand how the world of iOS development has become one of the most cloistered developer communities in recent memory. Is it the gold rush mentality, maybe? Seriously, some of the outright hostility I've seen in the iOS development community is breathtaking. Yes, there is a lot of money to be made in iOS development so, no, you probably don't need to practice community building in order to be successful...today. Regardless, your snide comment about "Rails engineers" reveals your own ignorance on the subject. There are plenty of software engineers that use Ruby but not Rails, and any developer who cannot use Ruby without Rails is unlikely to be of any threat to "redefine iOS development culture", since RubyMotion is not Rails. Edit: Also...since when have "hacker" and "respect for knowledge gained over 20+ years" ever had anything to do with each other? Take the "knowledge gained", evaluate it on its merits, and if you find it lacking, who cares over how many years it was gained?!? If you think you can do better, do so.

flatline3 14y ago
> I really don't understand how the world of iOS development has become one of the most cloistered developer communities in recent memory. Is it the gold rush mentality, maybe? You must understand that the iOS development community has its roots in decades of engineering community, coming from NeXT, Mac OS and UNIX traditions. We're simply not interested in the subpar engineering that comes from the inexperienced web developers joining the gold rush. > Edit: Also...since when have "hacker" and "respect for knowledge gained over 20+ years" ever had anything to do with each other? Take the "knowledge gained", evaluate it on its merits, and if you find it lacking, who cares over how many years it was gained?!? If you think you can do better, do so. Which is why we've watched the Rails community re-invent the wheel repeatedly over the past 6 years, consistently rediscovering abandoned methodologies, and then rediscovering why those methodologies were abandoned. One of my favorite examples was the the breathless enthusiasm at the rediscovery of the (inefficient, abandoned) pure pre-fork model: http://tomayko.com/writings/unicorn-is-unix http://tomayko.com/writings/unicorn-is-unix Or, watching the extremely poor architecture of Rails waste vast troves of server CPU and RAM. Or any other of the hundreds (thousands?) examples of junior engineers ignoring history and re-inventing failed architectures that would not have been so broken if they looked at what came before with anything other than disdain.
- sbarre 14y ago
  > We're simply not interested in the subpar engineering that comes from the inexperienced web developers joining the gold rush. I'm sorry but that's a super douchey thing to say. It's not like there's a limited number of "seats" in the iOS community room, and oh no you wouldn't want to waste some seats on web developers. And who are you to speak for the iOS community? There is room for everyone and anyone to join development communities and contribute as much or as little as they want. No one is forcing you to help anyone out if you think they're not smart or cool enough for your tastes. That's the beauty of all this, everyone is welcome. If you can't see that, you've missed out on some important lessons in your decades of engineering work..
  - flatline3 14y ago
    > That's the beauty of all this, everyone is welcome. If you can't see that, you've missed out on some important lessons in your decades of engineering work.. Not all ideas are equally valid. Socially-driven technology shifts are often not an improvement, yet they can change the industry we all work in. If mobile development is overrun by Rails developers -- and the engineering approaches they promote (often while ignoring history) -- the mobile development community (and the industry) will suffer.
- jasonwocky 14y ago
  > You must understand that the iOS development community has its roots in decades of engineering community, coming from NeXT, Mac OS and UNIX traditions. I'm sorry, but Fart Apps need not be the exclusive province of "very serious" developers. > Or any other of the hundreds (thousands?) examples of junior engineers ignoring history and re-inventing failed architectures that would not have been so broken if they looked at what came before with anything other than disdain. Maybe. Or perhaps the communication and people skills of the generation that came before them were somewhat lacking.
  - flatline3 14y ago
    > Maybe. Or perhaps the communication and people skills of the generation that came before them were somewhat lacking. Or perhaps we valued substance and were not so easily misled by style. Meanwhile, the bubbles have given inordinate voice to the inexperienced and those lacking substance.

hans_olo 14y ago

Heh, yeah. Look at that company. A 20 years old dude comes with some hipster unproven technology and the boss jumps at it. They are doomed to fail.

javierhonduco 14y ago
Every technology gets proven with its use, investing time, great loads of effort, sometimes money, and courage. Last one it's the most important for me :) Btw, did you know any technology that was already proven when it wasn't known? IMHO that's a part of the mainstreaming process, and almost everything we have today has past through it.
batista 14y ago
Unproven in what sense? This is not some novel academic concept. It's a Ruby port on the Obj-C runtime. If it builds and runs the app, there is absolutely nothing to be proven. Also, "a 20 years old dude comes with some hipster unproven technology"? Isn't this how Apple for one was founded? Not to mention Yahoo, Google and Facebook...
cnp 14y ago
RubyMotion changed the way our entire agency operates: we haven't outsourced a single app in months. It's been the best thing to happen to us, hands down.
- flatline3 14y ago
  You could have also just learned how to write Objective-C. It'd be more fair to your clients.
  - cnp 14y ago
    How so? These responses are quite simply FUD.
    - flatline3 14y ago
      For the same reason we don't use MonoTouch on client projects; it would creat a maintenance and hiring nightmare for our clients. You jumped on RubyMotion out of laziness or inability to learn something new.

thibaut_barrere 14y ago

Bypassing visual builders in favor of code is not a new idea! It happened as well with .Net and VisualStudio; I used to be a heavy WinForm developer (including visual tools). At some point being able to do everything programmatically proved to be really interesting in my use cases (and on other people projects, too). Not everyone is going to adopt CSS and Pixate, and people are using RubyMotion without Pixate, too. As for the Rails community, pure iOS people are also interested in RubyMotion (based on my exchanges with developers, that is). In the end, there is no such thing as lack of respect or bad influence. New tools get created, people pick what works for them. People using Rails used other platforms before and will use other platforms later. I'll end with an advice to (new?) programmers: don't let fear (of being replaced) choose your skills and tools for you.

flatline3 14y ago
> I'll end with an advice to (new?) programmers: don't let fear (of being replaced) choose your skills and tools for you. I'm more concerned about propagation of bad ideas. The current job market and VC climate has given extremely junior engineers a voice grossly disproportionate to their skill, wisdom, or experience. In a more healthy job market, those engineers would be hired into junior positions apprenticed to senior engineers. In the current job market, inexperienced engineers are given carte blanche, and this shifts the industry. Not all shifts are a net positive. It was with great dismay that I observed the rise of the Rails community, and I find it exceedingly disturbing to see their anti-intellectual, anti-experience, anti-computer-science approaches extending outside their initial realm of influence.

batista 14y ago

What exactly have you done in iOS programming to feel so entitled? Seriously, it must be awesome, give us a link maybe? That said, they may lack respect for "knowledge gained over 20+ years of platform development", but you also lack knowledge of the "worse is better" reality and the underlying Unix/Lisp history behind it.

flatline3 14y ago
> What exactly have you done in iOS programming to feel so entitled? One of the top-grossing apps with ~$60M/year in revenue. Considerable open-source libraries. A huge number of applications are running my code, even if you discount the code I have in the OS. > That said, they may lack respect for "knowledge gained over 20+ years of platform development", but you also lack knowledge of the "worse is better" reality and the underlying Unix/Lisp history behind it. "Worse is better" doesn't really mean anything. Most of the usage is predicated on false dichotomies and gross over-simplifications, usually revolving around the notion that the opposite of "worse" is nothing at all. Moreover, if any languages/platforms were a poster-boy for the "worse is better" mantra, it would be Apple's platforms. ObjC is high-functioning dinosaur.
- batista 14y ago
  >One of the top-grossing apps with ~$60M/year in revenue. Considerable open-source libraries. A huge number of applications are running my code, even if you discount the code I have in the OS. Sounds impressive (but, no pointers/links? How to differentiate from some random guy on the interwebs?). But surely with those credentials you don't have any reason to belittle some guy for using RubyMotion for development. Heck, even MacRuby itself was initiated and sponsored by Apple for a couple of years. The most important thing is the end result, not how it was made and if it was messy inside. Heck, OS X _is_ messy inside, and historically it had been much more messy, with a plethora of frameworks for legacy compatibility, a hodgepodge of system apps done with one or the other technology, etc, as you yourself acknowledge. If the app is well thought out, runs fast and does what it says without crashing, the customer could care less with what technology it was made with. You haven't given any proof that an app designed with RubyMotion would be worse off than one designed with Obj-C/Cocoa. It's not like IB is the be all end all of development. People have managed without it. And it's not like Obj-C magically gives more quality to your code compared to Ruby. Most of the "20 years of practices" sound like cargo-cult. A Ruby guy, even a RoR guy, coming to iOS development might have fresh ideas of the kind that an old Obj-C/NeXT veteran might not even be able to comprehend. I haven't seen any innovate iOS apps from NeXT-era Obj-C guys...