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So You Want To Be A Ruby Dev

kevingisi.com

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Re: So You Want To Be A Ruby Dev

#41

Post by gisikw »

crazydiamond wrote: post #39

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 on…

My solution was simply to recommend personalized tutoring via RailsMentors.org - as you can really learn from any development stack. It's just finding the right combination that can be very difficult for a new developer.

You bring up some very good suggestions - we need a better metric for whether things are stable, supported, etc. And you're absolutely right, Google won't work, and download counts won't work. I would be interested in seeing something like you've suggested though, essentially coming up with a "trust" system for different libraries.

At the same time, you have the experience available to test whether a gem runs on 1.8 or 1.9, where a new developer doesn't know how to read stack traces yet. Providing one-on-one support helps tackle this issue (RailsMentors.org), as would increased tutorials that try and _limit_ the range of choice, rather than overload the developer with too much.

Of course, these are just my own thoughts on how we can address the problem. I'm hopeful that by discussing it, people can come up with some additional solutions.

Re: So You Want To Be A Ruby Dev

#42

Post by gisikw »

kenjackson wrote: post #38

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 on…

It's certainly a reputation that has managed to stick with the Rails community for a while. And we're trying to get the jerks to shut up ;-)

And while I can say that Rails is fantastic, and in my opinion, the best framework out there, I'm also going to tell you: unless someone's willing to sit down and show you, don't listen to them. That said, there are many people who _aren't_ jerks, and are more than willing to help you reimplement Google Maps. A lot of them can be found at RailsMentors.org

Re: So You Want To Be A Ruby Dev

#43

Post by zem »

bphogan wrote: post #31
bho wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

to be fair, there are lots of very real advantages to 1.9. the development community finally seems to have collectively decided to take the plunge, and let the gems catch up, rather than waiting around on 1.8 forever.

Re: So You Want To Be A Ruby Dev

#44

Post by crazydiamond »

swatermasysk wrote: post #21

As someone who has been tinkering in Ruby for a couple of months, I can see where the author is coming from. Personally, I tried to spend time on what was stable (Ruby 1.8.7 and Sinatra). This allowed me to focus much more on the language yet still feel productive. Once you get past getting started, the decision on what to use (or who to ask) become much clearer.

That's the sensible approach most beginners take with ANY platform/software. Download the highest stable release and work with it.

Work with the cutting edge _later_.

Re: So You Want To Be A Ruby Dev

#45

Post by gamache »

chromatic wrote: post #40
gamache wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I understand that, but it took the Perl community years to step up and fill the gap. (Thanks BTW.)

The publisher's problem became the community's problem, which in turn became the language's problem.

Re: So You Want To Be A Ruby Dev

#46

Post by dasil003 »

wwortiz wrote: post #35
dasil003 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

7 years between point releases?
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