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Well, the magic is what enables the big productivity boost. It's a higher risk, higher reward approach. In some domains that added risk is unacceptable, but for

Well, the magic is what enables the big productivity boost. It's a higher risk, higher reward approach. In some domains that added risk is unacceptable, but for many applications it's a very worthwhile tradeoff. I think often when people say "I hate rails", they are really saying, "I hate building the types of apps that rails excels at". Which is fine, and makes sense, because rails excels at making apps that can be very cool and innovative on the product side, but are usually pretty boring on the engineering side--it doesn't really get interesting for the engineers until it's time to start replacing the lower level tiers of rails with something else. And while secure best practices are certainly stressed (and included as defaults), conservatism isn't seen as a valid reason to hold up progress. So you get both the speed and the occasionally bumpy ride that strategy entails.

entropy_ 14y ago
That has nothing to do with it whatsoever. They specified why they hate about rails, the magic. Personally, I simply cannot stand magic in frameworks I use. That's because I don't become truly productive when using a framework until I fully understand how everything works. It is not enough that it does work, I have to understand how it does. Otherwise, I'm constantly bogged down when implementing every single feature thinking about possible security and performance issues down the line. The performance thing might be premature optimisation in some cases, but the security definitely is not. That's why I hate when frameworks or IDEs have so much magic -- I'm looking at you Xcode, I can't count the times I was wondering if a particular statement would cause a memory leak or not before I finally understood most of the related magic Xcode and the toolchain for iOS dev do. For me at least, magic saps my productivity, it doesn't boost it. It also offers a steeper learning curve to proper mastery to get to that point where I'm actually productive. So yes, I haven't tried ruby on rails but I can definitely see myself hating it if it has too much magic.
- manojlds 14y ago
  I can somewhat relate to what you say, and that is perhaps why I prefer Django, as it has just the right amount of magic for me.
tomjen3 14y ago
Have you taken a look at the play framework? Yes it is inspired by rails, nearly as productive and very little magic. I don't get why you think I must secretly hate what rails is used for -- I don't, at all. And yes when rails was written the productivity was so much better than its competitors, rails was the choice. Today, not so much. Don't get me wrong if it is an internal wiki or other system then rails makes sense, since if you get hacked you can always find the guilty person. As for conservatism? Dude I write HTML5 games for a living and I am not arguing for JSPs here, just Play or Django or Sinatra (Ruby is great, don't get me wrong) but Magic is going to bite you at some point.
- danenania 14y ago
  I haven't personally looked at the play framework, though a former colleague who is steeped in both rails and scala did a pretty thorough comparison a few months back. He is definitely not a rails partisan, and much prefers scala to ruby as a language, but his conclusion was that while play has a solid core and does many things right (including some things better than rails), it comes up short on convenience and utility functions, templating, and ecosystem. I think the ecosystem in particular is an area where rails magic makes it possible for the community to create very powerful gems that just work, and is probably where the most time is saved vs. other frameworks that have more of an explicit bent. I understand the skepticism towards the implicit approach--it has certainly bitten me before, and I try to minimize magic in my own rails code wherever possible--but again, if you're optimizing for productivity, it can be a worthwhile tradeoff. Take devise as an example. Despite using all kinds of implicit and convoluted magic underneath, it can save huge amounts of time, especially early in a project, and is well tested and proven in the community. I'm not aware of a lib in any other framework that can handle so many boring authentication issues (sessions, roles, encryption, email confirmation, lockouts, remember me, forgot password flow, session expiration, redirect flows, etc. etc.) with such minimal code and configuration. Sorry if I put words in your mouth. I do think a framework like play has more conservatism in its blood, which is great. It's good that there are other options for when security, stability, and scalability are at more of a premium than developer productivity .
  - 14y ago

entropy_ 14y ago

That has nothing to do with it whatsoever. They specified why they hate about rails, the magic. Personally, I simply cannot stand magic in frameworks I use. That's because I don't become truly productive when using a framework until I fully understand how everything works. It is not enough that it does work, I have to understand how it does. Otherwise, I'm constantly bogged down when implementing every single feature thinking about possible security and performance issues down the line. The performance thing might be premature optimisation in some cases, but the security definitely is not. That's why I hate when frameworks or IDEs have so much magic -- I'm looking at you Xcode, I can't count the times I was wondering if a particular statement would cause a memory leak or not before I finally understood most of the related magic Xcode and the toolchain for iOS dev do. For me at least, magic saps my productivity, it doesn't boost it. It also offers a steeper learning curve to proper mastery to get to that point where I'm actually productive. So yes, I haven't tried ruby on rails but I can definitely see myself hating it if it has too much magic.

manojlds 14y ago
I can somewhat relate to what you say, and that is perhaps why I prefer Django, as it has just the right amount of magic for me.

tomjen3 14y ago

Have you taken a look at the play framework? Yes it is inspired by rails, nearly as productive and very little magic. I don't get why you think I must secretly hate what rails is used for -- I don't, at all. And yes when rails was written the productivity was so much better than its competitors, rails was the choice. Today, not so much. Don't get me wrong if it is an internal wiki or other system then rails makes sense, since if you get hacked you can always find the guilty person. As for conservatism? Dude I write HTML5 games for a living and I am not arguing for JSPs here, just Play or Django or Sinatra (Ruby is great, don't get me wrong) but Magic is going to bite you at some point.

danenania 14y ago
I haven't personally looked at the play framework, though a former colleague who is steeped in both rails and scala did a pretty thorough comparison a few months back. He is definitely not a rails partisan, and much prefers scala to ruby as a language, but his conclusion was that while play has a solid core and does many things right (including some things better than rails), it comes up short on convenience and utility functions, templating, and ecosystem. I think the ecosystem in particular is an area where rails magic makes it possible for the community to create very powerful gems that just work, and is probably where the most time is saved vs. other frameworks that have more of an explicit bent. I understand the skepticism towards the implicit approach--it has certainly bitten me before, and I try to minimize magic in my own rails code wherever possible--but again, if you're optimizing for productivity, it can be a worthwhile tradeoff. Take devise as an example. Despite using all kinds of implicit and convoluted magic underneath, it can save huge amounts of time, especially early in a project, and is well tested and proven in the community. I'm not aware of a lib in any other framework that can handle so many boring authentication issues (sessions, roles, encryption, email confirmation, lockouts, remember me, forgot password flow, session expiration, redirect flows, etc. etc.) with such minimal code and configuration. Sorry if I put words in your mouth. I do think a framework like play has more conservatism in its blood, which is great. It's good that there are other options for when security, stability, and scalability are at more of a premium than developer productivity .
- 14y ago