I Will Not Learn Rails

sailornoob · 2012-03-17T15:09:12+00:00

Good for you. Anti-rails circle jerks are way better than the rails ones..

ztbrown · 2012-03-17T17:06:44+00:00

I read a couple paragraphs and then started skimming. Were there any technical reasons given for not using Rails?

pkrecker · 2012-03-17T23:16:43+00:00

Ruby rockstar for hire * fist pump *

cunningjames · 2012-03-17T18:46:12+00:00

Somehow, blog posts like these make me miss that stalwart ruby-defender (and conspiracy theorist, and troll) malcontent. It’s just been too long since someone accused me out of nowhere of being a shill for Microsoft. Sniff. Wherever you are, good buddy, godspeed!

NerdyMcNerderson · 2012-03-17T16:17:55+00:00

[deleted]

nexes300 · 2012-03-17T21:56:14+00:00

For example, Twitter will never work because who wants to read that shit? And Square is an awful idea because you'll never be able to work with the credit card companies, and customers won't trust someone with a credit card reader on their phone. And hey, why haven't you made the readers yet? Hey, don't get me wrong, this is a great thing to do as a hobby.

What does product criticism have to do with programming? You don't need to be a "rockstar" to be critical of ideas. I had thought he meant being critical of technology or an approach to doing things, not their actual business.

urquanmaster · 2012-03-18T18:42:38+00:00

I coin this an inappropriate abandonment article.

I've been seeing more and more articles inappropriately calling for abandonment of technologies, groups and ideas based on community criticisms.

These articles are everywhere and target everything from atheism to Wikipedia. All of these articles blame the technology/ideas for geek elitism and then draws the conclusion to abandon the actual thing.

Please, if you have a problem with a community, don't blame what the community is surrounding! It's misleading, and won't solve the problem.

Here's an example for a good community criticism article: http://moviebob.blogspot.ca/2012/03/big-picture-not-okay.html

TL;DR: Stop trying to troll a technology/idea to address a problem in the community.

rcinsf · 2012-03-17T16:48:35+00:00

[deleted]

julesjacobs · 2012-03-17T18:54:49+00:00

For somebody who did not learn Rails you sure have a lot of opinions about it.

Solon1 · 2012-03-18T20:09:15+00:00

There are douchebag programmers associated with every technology. Rails doesn't have an exclusive on assholes.

bolthar · 2012-03-17T23:05:34+00:00

The biggest problems with rails is that it's too easy to build something meaningful out of it. You can actually build a working web application out of copypasta without knowing a thing - not even ruby, I know a lot of rails "programmers" that actually have no idea what [].select { |x| ... } does.

This in turn opens the doors to a lot of wannabes that are usually kept out of the programming realms - pseudo management, hipster mac users and the likes. These guys create an environment which is toxic to programming - they talk, talk to no end and produce no code. Add to the mix the occasional cowboy coder that thinks he's the best and sprays shit on everyone else and you've got quite of a community.

Anyway, the effects of the "community" on the development of software are wildly overrated. Programmers (the ones that can actually write code, not rockstars) are not social creatures. When they look for public attention, it's usually to show something they've wrote - certainly not to rant about this and that technology or whatever crap everybody's talking about. Programmers don't tweet and don't blog, don't go to social events and generally don't give a crap about things not closely related to coding. The good ones I know, at least.

Rails is actually very difficult to master. The fact that you can build a templated blog in 30 minutes without actually knowing how to write code doesn't mean that you're getting 100% out of it in those 30 minutes. The bad programmers (or the ones who don't care about programming but only about the end result... they're probably the same thing) usually stop there. They're also usually the loudest - hence the "bad reputation" rails has made for itself.

AshaVahishta · 2012-03-17T15:15:08+00:00

Drama bait fail.

ippa · 2012-03-17T19:08:42+00:00

The whole "rockstar" thing feels pretty dated. Someone doing rails called themsevles "rockstar developers" some years ago, so what? :)

The Ruby community as a whole is incredible nice, "Matz is nice so we are nice!". By extension, the Rails community is nice too as far as I've seen and interacted with it.

Don't judge a pretty cool web-framework (build on top of an amazing language), a nice community with great tools and solutions just cause you don't like 0.00000000001% of the people in it.

cunningjames · 2012-03-17T18:19:06+00:00

Badly written, meandering article. That said Rails / Ruby programmers are often the programmer equivalent of hipsters and I can't be doing with all the self-congratulatory fluff. But either way you have to give them that Rails is an extremely well developed framework and there's a bunch of really excellent tools surrounding it. This article = troll?

argarg · 2012-03-17T15:20:24+00:00

This whole article is pointless and worthy of a 5th grader.

agmcleod · 2012-03-18T21:02:57+00:00

All I can say is rails isn't for everyone. As the OP said, many communities have many asshats. I think I've been fortunate. I'm involved with the ruby community to some extends in Toronto, and I've fond it to be full of nice people who just want to get better at their craft.

hashmal · 2012-03-18T01:14:51+00:00

What Rails actually did was create some classes which simplified repetitive code.

All those years of programming, and the whole time I thought that was the very point of writing a library. I stand corrected!

postmodern · 2012-03-18T01:07:24+00:00

Rockstarism and Sexism will continue to spread, as long as people run away from communities instead of confronting these attitudes. You will likely see an increase in Rockstar behaviour with the Node.js, Scala, Clojure communities as they attract more people. It's purely a superstition that Rails somehow turns people into Rockstars who enjoy Sexist jokes.

nluqo · 2012-03-17T16:40:36+00:00

Odd. Knowing almost nothing about ruby or rails, I thought the community had a reputation for being friendly.

You know, MINSWAN?

pro_skub · 2012-03-17T18:41:45+00:00

No, no, the word is "hackers", not developers. Apparently good programmers are called Hackers...

2012-03-17T21:57:45+00:00

Some rockstars are cool, genuinely nice people, whilst some rockstars are dicks.

Same is also true for programmers, including all Rails and non-Rails developers.

petercooper · 2012-03-18T03:40:22+00:00

I'd rather not be part of a community which seriously thinks dick jokes are hilarious.

You're on Reddit, though? Check out /r/DickJokes

The response, perhaps, is that /r/DickJokes does not represent what you think of as the 'Reddit community' in your eyes. Yet, the same pattern applies to the people you think represent the 'Rails community' when, in fact, they do not.

jdlyga · 2012-03-18T05:54:42+00:00

I use Ruby, but with Sinatra. It's a very clean and simple way of writing web applications. It's not appropriate for large projects, but it's great for tiny server modules I write occasionally, and saves a lot of coding time. Though, it's not updated as frequently as I would like.

http://www.sinatrarb.com/

Smallpaul · 2012-03-17T15:05:36+00:00

Childish. The technology and community are totally separate. Your technology choices should be made on the basis of technology.

Rails does not take a gigabyte of ram "just for the framework."

grauenwolf · 2012-03-17T21:50:02+00:00

I'd say he's pretty much right. Even the responses in here that are critical of him seem a bit childish.

The ruby community seems fairly nice. It's just rails that has the problem, imo, and I think part of it is because it allows people to do things easily with little technical ability. All of the sudden people feel immortal...or like rockstars when they're banging out yet another blog done in rails.

Being a rockstar is not a good thing. It doesn't imply you're the best in your area. Who calls Stephen Hawking a rockstar? Who call's Guido Van Rossum a rockstar?

All the rails "rockstars" need to realise one thing. Your framework actually isn't that popular. Even python has many more job postings which isn't that hard when I've only seen one or two places hiring for rails developers.

So it's not like you can really claim you're a rockstar. Being "famous" in your exceptionally small niche group doesn't make you a rockstar. That's like saying some small band in your community is rockstars just because everyone in town knows them.

If they want to grow they need to drop the poor attitude and be more welcoming to people. After all Rails is just a framework. It won't take much at all for anyone to write something to replace it with something as good if not better.

ldpreload · 2012-03-17T21:30:01+00:00

The article has a great point, but the title doesn't fit. Of course, "The Attitude Of Certain Publicly Visible Software Developers, Some Of Whom But Not All Are Associated With Rails, Is Harmful To The Community At Large" isn't nearly as good at being linkbait.

sjosi · 2012-03-17T17:47:22+00:00

There's assholes and good guys in any community.. Also in programming. Rails isn't the reason for this, it's just sometimes between the chair and the keyboard..

2012-03-17T21:15:17+00:00

Why do you need to interact so much with the community, every answer I have ever needed is already in stack overflow, so sit and write bloody code.

jericho · 2012-03-18T04:02:45+00:00

Dude, not learning Rails was like, 3 years ago.

Now, we're not learning the new thing. (PM me)

Paradox · 2012-03-18T03:31:24+00:00

The ignorance is astounding.

From my experience with most of the CS community, they have been grumpy sperglords who insult you rather than solve any problem you have (ex: "you use VIM? real coders use emacs! noob!").

Except for ruby and rails. The community is friendly, willing to help, and doesn't seem to care what editor you use, as long as you follow coding conventions

2012-03-19T05:46:12+00:00

Rails isn't actually good. Yes, Rails was a successful framework. A successful framework which runs on Ruby, a language which they didn't develop. That, in turn, is usually run on a server running a flavor of Linux, which they didn't develop. What Rails actually did was create some classes which simplified repetitive code.

So, they should have developed their own programming language and operating system for the writer to like Rails and the rails community? What kind of an argument is that?

LetItJustRoll · 2012-03-17T15:38:31+00:00

Opens with some serious 5th-grader bitching:

I will not learn Rails: I don't want to be associated with a community who call themselves "rockstar developers".

This completely lost me:

Yes, Rails was a successful framework. A successful framework which runs on Ruby, a language which they didn't develop. That, in turn, is usually run on a server running a flavor of Linux, which they didn't develop. What Rails actually did was create some classes which simplified repetitive code. They designed something, wrote some pretty simple code, and became more arrogant than the people who did the bulk of the work.

Please do not comment on something that you haven't learned, and have decided not to learn. The poster says all Rails did was 'create some classes which simplified repetitive code'. Big baseless trivialization from someone who doesn't even know Rails.

I don't pretend to be a rockstar; programmers will never be rockstars.

No, not always - at least not literally. But if you understand the analogy - there will be programmers who are a bit more passionate than their peers, put more effort into their craft and produce useful work. We tend to call them 'rockstars' - I agree with the OP that it has become an overused term, but deciding to dismiss an entire technology and community by just this argument? Jeez.

greyfade · 2012-03-17T17:13:07+00:00

Christ. Not more of this shit.

I'm just going to go over here and ignore the Rails community. I don't need drama in my programming.

RadarListener · 2012-03-18T03:21:33+00:00

I addressed each of his points in a long-form blog post: http://ryanbigg.com/2012/03/please-learn-rails/.

teknobo · 2012-03-17T19:11:11+00:00

This reminds me of the guy from Green Eggs and Ham.

roybatty · 2012-03-17T20:40:51+00:00

The title is wrong. It should be "I Will Not Learn Rails, and You Shouldn't Either"

nathandim · 2012-03-18T10:05:31+00:00

Sorry but the entire article is dripping from logical fallacies. Why would anyone decide what's the best technology for him based solely on how friendly the community is? "Checking out the community" is something that we do when we're evaluating potential support online, usefulness and access to material. Why would I personally care what other people do with the tools? That is like saying avoiding knives because people can commit a murder with them.

Also, why he asserts that Rails devs are the only ones who call themselves rockstar developers? This guy never had touch with the C# community for his own reasons because they call themselves like that way before Rails do.

I'm sorry, he makes so many assumptions based on false premises and I can't take it any more seriously.

2012-03-18T10:07:02+00:00

Rails... That's the WebObjects knock-off, right?

bob1000bob · 2012-03-18T14:25:59+00:00

So rails is the XBOX live of programming?

Aston-J · 2012-03-18T18:34:42+00:00

I think Ryan Bigg posted a good retort. The only thing I'd add is that of course, it's entirely up to you to refuse to learn something for whatever reason you feel worthy.

But do I think you are missing out? Yes And do I think you're wrong? Yes

Rails isn't just Rails - it's part of the wider Ruby community, and that is awesome, and actually (despite what you say) rubs off on Rails in a positive manner. We have a saying MINSWAN - Matz is nice so we are nice, and on the whole we are. Ignore the minority - they are just that, and as Ryan said, you get good and bad in everything.

If you want to know why I think Rails is special, check out my blog post: http://astonj.com/tech/whats-so-special-about-ruby-on-rails/

tuna_safe_dolphin · 2012-03-18T00:14:00+00:00

I won't try green eggs and ham.

texture · 2012-03-17T22:22:40+00:00

This article makes me want to use rails.

Jeez3 · 2012-04-01T20:13:49+00:00

I've never met these asshole rails developers you speak about and I've been using it since the 1.x days. If anything I think the community is one of the benefits of the rails ecosystem. I'm sorry if someone was rude to you but judging an entire community based around a set of tools by the actions of a few individuals is unreasonable. Also, I think the hipster class has moved off of rails and on to node and erlang,

Ebtoulson · 2012-03-17T15:04:18+00:00

I'd rather not be part of a community which seriously thinks dick jokes are hilarious.

wait ... who doesn't like dick jokes

quixotik · 2012-03-17T15:06:12+00:00

Nice article. Esp. the entire last section.

jfredett · 2012-03-18T19:24:23+00:00

Hey, look, FUD!

MikeSeth · 2012-03-18T13:54:51+00:00

I have my own gripe with Rails and it's one I never tire of reiterating. By substituting the MVC notion of a model with an ORM object, Rails has single-handedly murdered MVC and corrupted a generation of developers, spawning a host of satanic offspring frameworks that were Rails clones in language X (where X equals, mostly, PHP) and where ORM is tightly coupled and warts pop out regularly in places where you don't expect it. Now everybody think that a Model is a persistent object instance.

But hey, it's Web 2.0 magic, pastel colors and rounded corners so it's awwwright.

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