[zaphar]

I think this concern gets lost in translation sometimes. It's not that you need to understand everything but you do need to know that there is a layer underneath. And it needs to be possible to follow a trail to and through that layer to debug things. Most of the time I don't need to understand the physics of a harddisk. But I know a hard disk operates under certain pysical laws. When I encounter something happening wrong it has on occasion been useful to be able to follow the trail all the way down to that disk and debug at that level.

Ruby's freewheeling philosophy however means that even when you are the author of the code some other code might have reached in and changed something out from under you. Not only do you not know there is another layer somewhere doing stuff that impacts you you can't even reliably follow a path to find that layer and debug it. As long as everyone does everything perfectly this is a wonderful world to live in. But the first time someone breaks the rules and impacts you and you lose a week or more unnecessarily you'll understand the distaste that ruby fosters in some people.

It's more about being able to discover what you need to know that it is possessing full knowledge of everything you need to know.

[mhink]

> Most of the time I don't need to understand the physics of a harddisk. But I know a hard disk operates under certain physical laws. When I encounter something happening wrong it has on occasion been useful to be able to follow the trail all the way down to that disk and debug at that level.

I'm not entirely sure how a filesystem works under the hood (let alone the physical media it's on), despite interacting heavily with one every day. A bug involving a hard disk would be incredibly opaque to debug, from my perspective. I suspect that you find it easy, because you've spent the time developing an understanding of the system.

> Not only do you not know there is another layer somewhere doing stuff that impacts you you can't even reliably follow a path to find that layer and debug it.

And this is where our roles are reversed! I would have little trouble following that path, all the way down into C if needed- because I've spent plenty of time understanding the system.

The problems you describe are problems anyone would have with an unfamiliar system, and it's not Ruby's fault.

[bpchaps]

>The problems you describe are problems anyone would have with an unfamiliar system, and it's not Ruby's fault.

Way to reduce what he's saying into the classic, "He can't be depressed! There's starving kids in Africa dying!". You've taken his /observations/, misplaced the usefulness of those observations, and then reduced them into some absurd argument that he's not actually making.

Accessibility to the unfamiliar access goes wonders and reduces the "magic" feel. If ruby doesn't have that sort of accessibility, then it IS Ruby's fault. If that's what Ruby actually wants, that's fine - but holy crap, it's this sort of mentality that completely fucks over usability.

[jevgeni]

Exactly.

I actually like Ruby, but hate RoR, because of a very lacking sense of control, unless you are very deep into it. You have absolutely zero feeling for what it OK and what's not OK to do with so much implicit magic behind the scenes. And that's debilitating.

My interaction with RoR can be boiled down to this exaggerated dialog:

- Here, write your code in this pattern and it will work.

- And if I change it like this?

- No it won't work.

- But why?

- It's an opinionated framework. It's the opinion of some Very Smart People(tm).

- But this is my work. Why can't I do it the way I want?

- Because you are dumb. And your dog is dumb. You haven't grokked it. You aren't a hacker. Neither is your dog. Where are your hoodie and Nike Airs?