| My day job is working on Rails apps (most of the time anyway -- we have a diverse infrastructure). I'm not a big fan of Rails architecture and struggle to communicate to others why I think the "Rails Way" is not necessarily a good way. But these things are hard to swallow, especially if you haven't seen anything else before. However, I have a special dislike for "convention over configuration". What that really means is: You must write code my style. As there is no configuration, it will be difficult to discover what that means by reading the code. You must study and memorise the one true way. If you deviate from it, strange things will probably happen and it will be your fault for not doing it my way. To be fair, Rails documentation is really very good. Also, this is a selling point for the framework. If you give no choices then everybody must do it the same way. Even if that way is stupid. You can hire a whole bunch of people who "know rails" and they can struggle along and make progress. You don't have to trust them with decisions because the important decisions were already made for them. I've had a wide and varied career before doing this work. It's hard for me accept "because it's the Rails Way" to questions like "Why are we doing this when it is causing problems?" I don't mind people making mistakes as long as it is not a thoughtless mistake. "I thought this would work, but I was wrong", is a wonderful sentence in my book. Unfortunately that's the kind of action that many programmers are dissuaded from taking -- instead they are encouraged to do it the "Rails Way". Lots of beginning programmers also prefer it this way. When you are first starting out (and... well... even when you've been doing it for a couple of decades) it's hard to know which way is better. You might even have a preference, but then struggle greatly when someone asks "Why is that better". Especially beginning programmers often get stuck without knowing any way to accomplish something. In those cases, the "Rails Way" is extremely comforting. 1) It's a way. 2) It will probably work (at least grossly) 3) Famous people say it's good, so it's very, very comforting to agree. People entrenched in the community reinforce each other until it seems practically impossible that there might be a better way. But they may not have looked. Of course Rails is not the only "Way" out there that espouses these ideas. It's just a currently popular one. What's really at fault is the "convention over configuration" attitude -- Don't think; just do it my way. I hate that. |