Arrghh… Ruby on Rails.

[elfs]

Ruby is just an excuse for people who once loved spaghetti code, who wanted to be “the smartest guy in the room,” and who wanted to be indispensible, to get back at everyone who loved Python and thought that there was finally a decent way to write disciplined code.

Everyone talks about how nice Ruby folks are.  Ruby is vengeance with a smile.  After spending several hours digging through a Rails app trying to figure out where the hell all of these invocations are coming from, where they’re defined, and what they do (the whole “we can arbitrarily redefine typographic symbols!” thing is insane!), I’ve just gotten to the point where I want to growl, “Wanna know how I got these scars?“

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.com

Comments

[casualprofessor.livejournal.com]

Wow! what a difference 2+ years makes.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Good point. The difference appears to be between writing my own code, where everything I know about the program is organically embedded in my brain, and reading someone else's code, where knowledge about the program is organically embedded in someone else's brain.

Trying to read the average rails hacker's code is more like archeology than programming. And the mutability of the language makes a refactoring tool damnably difficult.

This is probably why I liked Cucumber. It boiled everything down to small, simple modules where the API was obvious and unmangled.

[norikos-author.livejournal.com]

This is _NOT_ a Ruby problem -- this is a Rails problem, both the object-oriented-spaghetti code and the niceness issue.

Merb is much, much, _much_ nicer in all respects. Rails has a major problem understanding that just being _able_ to do something doesn't mean you _should_ do it -- and that even if your screwdriver has a large, heavy handle, you shouldn't use it to drive nails; nor does it mean that problems requiring glue can be solved just as well with a badly-driven nail (method_missing, I'm looking at *you*).

I'm hoping that the Merb/Rails3 merger helps with this, but to be honest, I'm only really optimistic about it helping with the technical issues. I'm not really expecting it to do much about the community, unfortunately. I hope Merb retains a viable community for just that reason.

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

I'm amused by this, 'cause Ruby and Python are two of my favorite languages. My biggest concern is almost invariably the ability to write clean object-oriented designs with a minimum of syntactic sugar.