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by ritchiea 2006 days ago
Interesting, I'd say the opposite. In a Rails app that was written consistently with the styles and APIs documented in the Rails docs I have never been more productive. In other micro-framework type environments, regardless of the language, Ruby/Sinatra, Python/Flask, Javascript/Express. Most codebases I've encountered are a mess of inconsistencies introduced by various developers over the years. With a lot of the mess, effectively re-writing the core features of Rails and it's most popular gems.

Rails, if done correctly, is a remarkable tool to allow developers to focus on the business logic and UI of their app and forget about the "filler features" that pretty much every app needs implemented. On the other hand if you write Rails code without reading the docs and re-invent the wheel rather than doing things the Rails way, essentially running an app in the framework without using the framework methods, you can create yourself a monstrous unmaintainable codebase like no other.

1 comments

Rails is not vanilla Ruby. And web apps are not the only software that needs to be written.

I moved on from Ruby land right as AWS was blowing up, and admitted I have never worked in Rails.

You're correct, Rails is not Ruby. But in my experience 80%+ of the Ruby ecosystem is Rails. But now I'm even more curious what problems you encountered with Ruby because I find it to be an excellent scripting language, especially if performance is not a major concern.
To be fair, it’s probably not Ruby, but the clever linguists I was working with 2008-2012 era.

Everyone brought their preferred syntax and there was much less of a “let’s solve the problem, not be clever” sentiment back then.

That said, Python almost makes such things impossible. Decorator patterns are the only thing I can think of in Python that ever made me really think.

6 to one, half dozen to another. How we start out thinking about problems has an impact on what syntax works for us best later on. I’m in my 40s and started in electronics, designing boards that shipped in Nortel kit.

I started with C and little else, not digging into OOP until hardware work went overseas. Perhaps my brain is over specialized to prefer a particular way of visualizing code I need to write.

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