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by jhardcastle 3340 days ago
But isn't that the idea behind Rails? Opinionated defaults with a config to change the setting somewhere?
2 comments

Yes, but at some point you can't just go around installing all the possible extensions/gems/whatever that you think are "good". The default gemfile would be 300 lines long with "developer happiness" gems such as `oink`, `bullet`, etc etc etc.

Most of the things that Rails is "opinionated" about are far more arbitrary than this, like whether the database primary key should be “id”, “postId”, “posts_id”, or “pid”.

> Most of the things that Rails is "opinionated" about are far more arbitrary than this

To my eye, at least, it isn't a matter of being arbitrary, but rather not having an answer.

PK names don't matter to the machine, so long as everything agrees and modulo illegal values. Humans get massively opinionated, but the machine doesn't care.

Compare with: How long should a query take to run? No, I'm not going to tell you what kind of query, or the size of the dataset, or the hardware at the bottom of the stack, or what the app is actually doing.

It is like asking what specific clothes an arbitrary person should wear.

The key is, I think, the "opinionated" part. Something like "how long should the DB statement timeout be" isn't really something people would have a general opinion on.

Also this stuff is all heavily Postgres specific; I think @nateberkopec's estimate of 300 gems is probably too low, even if you limit it to only say the top five most popular datastores.