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How 'explicit' something is has more to do with the social structures around a new technology. Does rails make it easy to understand how its conventions are app

How 'explicit' something is has more to do with the social structures around a new technology. Does rails make it easy to understand how its conventions are applied? Does it assume that all rails programmers understand implementation details? It does not, and so it is fair to criticize it for magic. In principle you could solve the 'magic' problem without changing a line of code, purely by changing how the mechanisms provided are packaged to new programmers. I spent some time last year trying to distinguish between abstractions and services. According to me, abstractions are things that you are expected to understand the workings of, and services are things you are not. By my definitions, rails is a service, but the lisp programming model is an abstraction, because it is impossible to gain a few months of experience with lisp without understanding in great detail how macros are expanded and so on. Many programming libraries are services because in practice nobody bothers to learn how they work, and we as a field, as a species, tolerate this cargo culting. Unfortunately I had trouble articulating this distinction. Perhaps I still do. Here, take a look: http://akkartik.name/blog/libraries http://akkartik.name/blog/libraries.

sanderjd 14y ago
This is an interesting perspective if I'm understanding you correctly. Are you saying that Rails is "magical" because it is often presented to new people that way, but if it were more often presented as "a bunch of Ruby code that does a bunch of stuff, please do go look and see how it does that stuff", it would not be "magical" without being implemented or documented at all differently?
- akkartik 14y ago
  Kinda, if I'm making sense of your question :) Did my article make sense? I'd love to hear what you thought of it. There's basically two halves: 1. Under-promising. I'll quibble with the word 'documented'. Part of the problem is that frameworks market and position themselves with their prose to be hermetically sealed containers offering wondrous features. That's part of their documentation. That we do need to change, IMO. 2. Over-delivering. It's not enough to be open source, and it's not enough to just say, "please do go look and see how it does that stuff." Software is in the stone ages because we aren't able to actively help newcomers get quickly up to speed on our code. We need to think about the big picture of a codebase, and how it's presented to others.

sanderjd 14y ago

This is an interesting perspective if I'm understanding you correctly. Are you saying that Rails is "magical" because it is often presented to new people that way, but if it were more often presented as "a bunch of Ruby code that does a bunch of stuff, please do go look and see how it does that stuff", it would not be "magical" without being implemented or documented at all differently?

akkartik 14y ago
Kinda, if I'm making sense of your question :) Did my article make sense? I'd love to hear what you thought of it. There's basically two halves: 1. Under-promising. I'll quibble with the word 'documented'. Part of the problem is that frameworks market and position themselves with their prose to be hermetically sealed containers offering wondrous features. That's part of their documentation. That we do need to change, IMO. 2. Over-delivering. It's not enough to be open source, and it's not enough to just say, "please do go look and see how it does that stuff." Software is in the stone ages because we aren't able to actively help newcomers get quickly up to speed on our code. We need to think about the big picture of a codebase, and how it's presented to others.