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So You Want To Be A Ruby Dev

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Re: So You Want To Be A Ruby Dev

#31

Post by bphogan »

bho wrote: post #28
thibaut_barrere wrote: post #15

You could write the same article for most in-depth subjects. Want to try model airplanes ? Get ready to spend a couple of days just to figure out the various materials, radios etc Want to try computer assisted music ? Which plugin ? Which host ? How do I write music with this, etc ? You could even rewrite the article for Java a few years back at least (should I go WebLogic ? WebSphere ? TomCat ? Struts or something e…

i think the deal is that it wasn't like this for ruby before.(and it still really isn't, but rails has grown exponentially)

It's been like this with Ruby since certain developers have been pushing harder for 1.9 adoption. A new developer is gonna pick the higher version number, cos higher version means newer. They're then gonna wonder why some gem doesn't work :)

Re: So You Want To Be A Ruby Dev

#32

Post by philwelch »

gisikw wrote: post #25
crazydiamond wrote: post #11

Unnecessarily critical and not amusing. To bring up jruby and rubinius for someone starting out in ruby??? Why not also confuse him with Macruby ? I develop more for fun .. i develop in ruby 1.9 and test to see it works in 1.8.7 also. No big deal! I use "gem" for installing gems. Not bundler. No need to confuse someone new with RVM and ask him to play with all versions of ruby till he finds the one that suits him. It…

The article is meant to be taken as satire, but do consider that if you're a new developer and you go a'Googling, you're going to encounter JRuby, and Rubinius, and Macruby. It would be silly to throw all of these items at a new developer, and no teacher in their right mind would ever do that. But if you're trying to pick up the language on your own...that's what you'll see.

Unless Ruby's your first programming language, I don't see how you can be that astonished by the fact that there are multiple implementations of the same programming language.

Re: So You Want To Be A Ruby Dev

#33

Post by nanairo »

steveklabnik wrote: post #6

While I don't _disagree_ with this... it's the place the Ruby community has chosen among the 'stability vs. innovation' continuum. The Ruby community may be a bit chaotic, but it also innovates and iterates really fast. I also choose to use Arch and not Debian on my computers. Such is life.

Exactly. The Ruby community likes to experiment and it's a bit hyperactive. Personally I quite like it because of that.

That said the article was a bit of a stretch both in the example it used, and in particular the fact that the Ruby world is currently undergoing a big shift. I would imagine one year from now a lot of those choices will be gone (e.g. Ruby 1.9.1 or even 1.8.x, Rails 2.x and maybe some of the less popular Ruby implementations).

But the general principle is correct: the Ruby community likes to try, change, play with new frameworks and ideas. If you hate the principle, then maybe Ruby is not for you. Or maybe in true Open source philosophy, you can make a simpler installer, or get someone else to do it. Then you'd have made the Ruby world a better place, and we'd all thank you for it. :)

Re: So You Want To Be A Ruby Dev

#34

Post by pyre »

gisikw wrote: post #25
crazydiamond wrote: post #11

Unnecessarily critical and not amusing. To bring up jruby and rubinius for someone starting out in ruby??? Why not also confuse him with Macruby ? I develop more for fun .. i develop in ruby 1.9 and test to see it works in 1.8.7 also. No big deal! I use "gem" for installing gems. Not bundler. No need to confuse someone new with RVM and ask him to play with all versions of ruby till he finds the one that suits him. It…

The article is meant to be taken as satire, but do consider that if you're a new developer and you go a'Googling, you're going to encounter JRuby, and Rubinius, and Macruby. It would be silly to throw all of these items at a new developer, and no teacher in their right mind would ever do that. But if you're trying to pick up the language on your own...that's what you'll see.

  > but do consider that if you're a new developer and you go
  > a'Googling, you're going to encounter JRuby, and Rubinius, and
  > Macruby.
Then the solutions are relatively simple:

1. Forcibly prevent people from developing new Ruby interpreters, Ruby frameworks, and alternatives to popular Ruby tools.

-- or --

2. Force Google to adopt a old-style Yahoo / DMoz approach to internet search so that a Google employee can sort/categorize all of these things manually for presentation to the user.

The crux of the article seems to be that too many choices can be overwhelming to a newbie, so we should restrict everyone's ability to choose so that inexperienced, new developers don't hurt themselves (or run screaming due to information overload / confusion).

Re: So You Want To Be A Ruby Dev

#35

Post by wwortiz »

dasil003 wrote: post #9
steveklabnik wrote: post #6

While I don't _disagree_ with this... it's the place the Ruby community has chosen among the 'stability vs. innovation' continuum. The Ruby community may be a bit chaotic, but it also innovates and iterates really fast. I also choose to use Arch and not Debian on my computers. Such is life.

Also it's worth noting that the core ruby language moves quite slowly. It's just Rails and the gem ecosystem that moves a maddening pace.

It moves pretty quick in comparison to other languages though, and I rather think the versioning system is a bit weird as 1.9 broke backwards comparability enough that quite a few ruby libraries and programs are still only functional on 1.8 without editing source

Re: So You Want To Be A Ruby Dev

#36

Post by gamache »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #7
krainboltgreene wrote: post #3

Wow, that's an insanely brilliant thump against Ruby and the community. As a born Rubyist (That is I started programming with Ruby) hopefully this article will get enough traction to make people start looking into having Ruby be as easy as it should be to start with.

I wouldn't call it "brilliant"; it's a rant. Not that there's anything wrong with rants. This is a frustrating moment in Rails history, a two-fold version transition; a little cursing is to be expected. Ruby is transitioning to 1.9. Rails is transitioning to version 3. These things are always painful. Some platforms try to rip off the band aid; others try to step slowly and carefully from one version to another. Then…

Then there are the platforms that just stop shipping new versions for a decade or so.

Perl's mistake was not releasing another Camel Book for a decade. The Perl 5.x language and libraries have done just fine.

Re: So You Want To Be A Ruby Dev

#37

Post by cubicle67 »

gorm wrote: post #16

If you want to be a ruby dev, then install linux. On windows you use Visual Studio and .NET

on Windows, you use VMWare and Linux. Linux is hands down the best Ruby development platform I've used, whereas Ruby on Windows can be a bit sucky at times, especially with gems that require native builds

Re: So You Want To Be A Ruby Dev

#38

Post by kenjackson »

The problem with RoR, isn't RoR. It's the community. I've frankly never seen a worse community to outsiders. Every discussion I've had with them, they end up basically saying, "RoR makes things so easy that over the weekend I reimplemented Google Maps in Outlook Web running Gears of War, with multitouch support -- all HTML6 compliant. And then on Sunday I watched football. MS sucks."

But then you begin to peel the onion and you start to realize -- that onion looks kinda similar to this other onion I was using.

Don't get me wrong, RoR is good technology. The community oversells it, and the most outspoken are kind of jerks (for some reason the Java, Python, C#, C++, Haskell, Scala, Clojure communities don't seem to have the rudeness or jerkness).

Re: So You Want To Be A Ruby Dev

#39

Post by crazydiamond »

I know you were trying to be satirical, gisikw, but you could have offered some suggestions or solutions. For example, I've often commented that I do not know whether a gem runs on 1.9 or 1.8. I have to test it out.

There are many many ruby projects on the rubyforge site that have never released code. They still exist after years! and they come up in searches. There are those that are obsolete, broken, or with not one line of documentation that one has to download, go through source code to figure out what it does, and if it does anything at all.

When a person comes in to ruby he needs a starting page on ruby-lang.org that tells him the popular gems or frameworks for major uses: such as CLI programs, web dev, scientific computing etc. What some call a list of "blessed" gems/projects.

However, we cannot criticize ruby if everyone is writing his own framework, parser, templating engine etc. Its also hard to be critical that so much documentation and tutorials online are outdated/broken due to the constant rate of change. Either devs are not updating tutorials/articles, or google is bringing up older documents first.

When we see a high download count for a gem that still does not indicate that people are using it. It only means people have downloaded it to check out. DOwnload counts are deceiving. Gems that offer a very sketchy description and have NO webpage often get a high download count since that's the only hope of figuring out what it does.

Re: So You Want To Be A Ruby Dev

#40

Post by chromatic »

gamache wrote: post #36
mechanical_fish wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call it "brilliant"; it's a rant. Not that there's anything wrong with rants. This is a frustrating moment in Rails history, a two-fold version transition; a little cursing is to be expected. Ruby is transitioning to 1.9. Rails is transitioning to version 3. These things are always painful. Some platforms try to rip off the band aid; others try to step slowly and carefully from one version to another. Then…

Then there are the platforms that just stop shipping new versions for a decade or so. Perl's mistake was not releasing another Camel Book for a decade. The Perl 5.x language and libraries have done just fine.

Don't mistake a publisher's problem for a language's problem.
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