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What’s Up With All These Changes in Rails?

yehudakatz.com

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Re: What’s Up With All These Changes in Rails?

#61

Post by ssmoot »

wycats wrote: post #29
psadauskas wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is embarrassingly slow. I did some tests a couple years ago, on ActiveRecord 3.0.pre, and its 20x slower to initialize empty objects (no database access) than DataMapper, or just making empty Ruby objects & hashes. https://gist.github.com/260280 Edit: Ran it with AR 3.0.7 and 3.1.0.rc4. Granted, this is with a 2-years newer CPU, but 3.0.7 is a huge step up. 3.1 seems to have regressed again, I'll ping tenderlove a…

Benchmarks on ActiveRecord before the work Aaron did on Arel (which was dropped in in 3.0.x due to the magnitude of the perfect issue/improvement) are not totally relevant today. There are still some issues, but there is still low-hanging-fruit as well, such as Aaron's work to add prepare statement caching to Rails 3.1

You'd reasonably expect to give up partial updates for prepared statements, and IIRC their performance benefit was fairly marginal anyways.

Re: What’s Up With All These Changes in Rails?

#62

Post by elithrar »

freshfunk wrote: post #35
Jd wrote: post #22

There's a deeper problem that Yehuda isn't hitting and that is that there is an inverse correlation between being cool and cutting edge and being consumer friendly. Rails is, and really has always been, a framework which changes very quickly. Although virtually all of these changes are for the better either in some abstract feels-better sense or in a tangible practical sense, each of these changes imposes a cost on o…

Glad to hear your opinion on this. What frameworks, in your opinion, are stable, relevant today, easy to use, and has a good community? I've been doing some client-side scripting with Ruby lately just for fun and I've also played with Python in the past. I haven't used Rails or Django. After reading all of this, I'm leaning towards Python/Django but haven't used neither web framework I'm curious as to people's opinio…

> After reading all of this, I'm leaning towards Python/Django but haven't used neither web framework I'm curious as to people's opinions.

Django has a good reputation for API stability, and has fantastic documentation (Rails has caught up, but for a long time Django was a standout). My 1.1 books still work for 90% of 1.3, and the 1.1>1.2>1.3 release notes explain and offer solutions for any changes they make (such as class-based views).

I dabbled in Rails & Django over the last 2-3 years, and took a big detour into Rails a few months ago. I like the conventions, but it's easy to get distracted when looking for plug-ins/gems to solve your problems. Every time I look back at Django, it takes me half a day to get back into the flow. Rails, not so much.

Re: What’s Up With All These Changes in Rails?

#63

Post by hitonagashi »

Jd wrote: post #22

There's a deeper problem that Yehuda isn't hitting and that is that there is an inverse correlation between being cool and cutting edge and being consumer friendly. Rails is, and really has always been, a framework which changes very quickly. Although virtually all of these changes are for the better either in some abstract feels-better sense or in a tangible practical sense, each of these changes imposes a cost on o…

1) Agreed. Fully. Of my outside work time messing around on projects and such, 50% is reading HN, 50% is experimenting with new Rails plugins, or Ruby gems, or databases. I find on average, I end up finding something I prefer every 1.5 years as well.

2) Disagree here. Sure, you can't forget about it, but Rails 2 is perfectly useable. I'm currently managing a fairly substantial mix of Rails 2 and Rails 3 apps for various clients. If 2.3 works fine for them, and they want a minor feature every few months, it's just not worth the cost to them to upgrade. Sure, if major security holes emerge, patch and upgrade.

3) Agreed. I have a big gap between "things I play with on personal projects", and "things I'd use when I'm being paid at work". When I'm writing things for a client, I want battle tested code that I can predict against. I want to be able to say "That will take me a week", so I can bill, without the risk of going overbudget. If I take a new and shiny framework, and as a result of bugs in their code, or lack of documentation/6 month old blog posts being totally redundant and wrong, I end up slipping on the deadlines, that's not a situation I want to be in.

The thing that I really like is that Rails 2.x worked. I've got github, which stores old versions of gems and plugins for me to grab. I love Rails 3, and I teach new developers on it all the time, as I think it's far easier to learn and far more intuitive than Rails 2, but with Rails, I can take advantage of a fast moving easy to write system on new projects, while not getting screwed over on the old ones.

Re: What’s Up With All These Changes in Rails?

#65

Post by cies »

chollida1 wrote: post #30
Jd wrote: post #22

There's a deeper problem that Yehuda isn't hitting and that is that there is an inverse correlation between being cool and cutting edge and being consumer friendly. Rails is, and really has always been, a framework which changes very quickly. Although virtually all of these changes are for the better either in some abstract feels-better sense or in a tangible practical sense, each of these changes imposes a cost on o…

> (1) If you are a Rails developer you need to be a full-time Rails developer and not do too much else. You can't do Rails and a bunch of other things because Rails will take up a lot of your time. I'm glad to see someone else say this. I don't use rails often, nor am I a "front end" developer by trade. I have put together some simple web apps using rails, but it seems that each time I go back to rails and try to use…

i feel often enough that things could be simpler in rails, but still i think that rails is currently still the fastest fw to get most webapps done.

by most webapps i mean: (r)dbms-backed, uses a fair bit of html/css (not pure js), that needs to do 'common webapp things' (authentication though fb/google/etc.; audit trails; some REST api; memcache; pagination; ...)

going back -- to php, jsp or even (albeit less so) django -- would complicate things for me.

i feel at time rails might seem to take up a lot of time; but actually it is web development just being quite laborious, and rails one of the best fw to "take the pain out of it" and "providing sane defaults that can be changed where you see fit".

Re: What’s Up With All These Changes in Rails?

#66

Post by philwelch »

kenjackson wrote: post #45
philwelch wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DHH:Rails::Linus:Linux.

Can Linus single-handedly block changes from getting into Linux? That just seems crazy to me if he can. I get that DHH and Linus have pulpits, but that's all they should have. It's just extremely disappointing to hear someone say something can't get in, not because of quality, but because there's one person who doesn't like it. With that said, people do fork Linux, see Android. Do people fork RoR and actually produce…

How exactly do you think an open source software project should be managed? People are going to have disagreements about changes, and there needs to be some method of adjudicating those disagreements. Democracy is near-impossible in those circumstances because key problems like suffrage (who counts as enough of a contributor to have a vote?) are hard to fix, and because actual technical expertise is important to decision-making. Wikipedia is probably the best example of a project that's run democratically, by consensus at least, and the net result is that more effort is wasted on politicking than actually writing content. The only reason this even works for Wikipedia is because there's no shortage of people who can write and copyedit encyclopedia articles. Programmers are more scarce, and more allergic to politics.

So benevolent dictatorship it is, plus the freedom to fork. As for Rails, changes like using jQuery instead of Prototype (pre-3.1), or using HAML or something like that doesn't actually require making any code changes. In fact, these controversies are classic bikeshed arguments. It's not a serious criticism of Rails that the default gemfile doesn't include a gem you prefer, because you can change the gemfile yourself. It would be a serious criticism of Rails--and, indeed, a reason to fork--if, for instance, there was strong disagreement with how Arel is implemented. But there's 100x more Rails developers with an opinion over HAML vs ERB than there are Rails developers with the slightest clue about how to implement Arel.

Re: What’s Up With All These Changes in Rails?

#67

Post by cies »

jamesbritt wrote: post #59
ssmoot wrote: post #13

I'm not a fan of Rails myself, but I sympathize with Yehuda's position. The helpers are my #1 gripe with Rails. It really kills productivity to have to dig through all your views for what feels like pet changes. The one point Yehuda's making I'd dispute is the impact of Arel. I saw a very early version of Arel back when I was maintaining DataMapper. To be clear, Arel is beautiful code. It's ridiculously well done IMO…

Best of all worlds would have been to drop AR altogether and promote a migration to Sequel for the official Rails O/RM. ;-) Indeed. Or decouple the ORM entirely, though that likely removes a key aspect of what Rails is about. It is, however, what makes Ramaze so appealing. No coupling to any ORM, but there is a community inclination to use Sequel (so you can learn from example and there are people to answer questions…

ORM is decoupled in rails to my knowledge...

there is a default to AR which is easy to overwrite with your ORM of choice (which often provides an ActiveModel interface and further rails integration by installing one extra gem).

tl;dr: providing sane defaults != strong coupling

Re: What’s Up With All These Changes in Rails?

#68

Post by kenjackson »

philwelch wrote: post #66
kenjackson wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can Linus single-handedly block changes from getting into Linux? That just seems crazy to me if he can. I get that DHH and Linus have pulpits, but that's all they should have. It's just extremely disappointing to hear someone say something can't get in, not because of quality, but because there's one person who doesn't like it. With that said, people do fork Linux, see Android. Do people fork RoR and actually produce…

How exactly do you think an open source software project should be managed? People are going to have disagreements about changes, and there needs to be some method of adjudicating those disagreements. Democracy is near-impossible in those circumstances because key problems like suffrage (who counts as enough of a contributor to have a vote?) are hard to fix, and because actual technical expertise is important to deci…

How exactly do you think an open source software project should be managed? People are going to have disagreements about changes, and there needs to be some method of adjudicating those disagreements. Democracy is near-impossible in those circumstances because key problems like suffrage (who counts as enough of a contributor to have a vote?) are hard to fix, and because actual technical expertise is important to decision-making.

Of course there will be disagreements, but no single person should have so much power as to block changes.

I have no particular care about HAML. But rather the notion that any piece of technology isn't in popular OSS like RoR because one person objects. I find that offensive.

Wikipedia is probably the best example of a project that's run democratically, by consensus at least, and the net result is that more effort is wasted on politicking than actually writing content.

The net result is that its useful, LOTS of content generated, and democratic. Arguing is part of a democracy. I don't mind it.

So benevolent dictatorship it is

For all the talk of freedom, this is disappointing.

Re: What’s Up With All These Changes in Rails?

#69

Post by wycats »

kingkilr wrote: post #50

> Ruby core (“MRI”) itself has sunk an enormous amount of time into performance improvements in Ruby 1.9, going so far as to completely rewrite the core VM from scratch. This isn't particularly accurate, my understanding is that what became the 1.9 VM was originally an external fork (or rewrite, I'm not clear on which) known as YARV, which was later integrated, but was not originally developed by the MRI team. As alw…

YARV was an external fork that was integrated into MRI pretty early, and then worked on by the core team for several years. My point was simply that YARV's existence and the commitment of the core team to get it into core (and the resulting performance improvements) disprove the idea that the Ruby core team doesn't care about performance.

Re: What’s Up With All These Changes in Rails?

#70

Post by dazonic »

trustfundbaby wrote: post #18

I appreciate the post and am a huge fan of Yehuda, he used my comments as teeing off points for your remarks but I feel that what I was trying to say has been lost in his response, probably because I was unclear. Lets start with this ... "The Rails core team does seem to treat the project as if it’s a personal playground" This was said more in frustration with the coffeescript/sass decision than any real belief that…

On coffeescript and sass, I guess I'm just a blind-following zombie fanboy that does whatever the Rails team tells me. I moved all my javascript to coffeescript and css to sass, it was love at first sight and in my mind it was the best decision ever. I know it was all available long before 3.1, I had played with both but never in real projects, and having it baked-in makes it easy for me.

I guess I'm basically just an end user, I like to use technology that's vouched-for and I trust the Rails team. Rails suits me.

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