I can't help but wonder how these developers that are struggling to install rails on OSX will go when it comes to setting up rails in a production environment.
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Kickstarter: rails.app
141–150 of 175 posts
Re: Kickstarter: rails.app
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
He did, actually. Much of the work he did on Merb and Rails 3 was generously funded by Engine Yard.
Though I'm quite thankful Engine Yard chose to fund his work, I'd categorize doing so as an investment than a generous act. Nothing wrong with either, of course.
I would certainly agree (especially his work on Merb, since they began offering commercial Merb support and such while he was doing that). The "generously" was partially true, partially facetious. :)
Re: Kickstarter: rails.app
#143Please excuse the language, but what the fuck is happening to our world right now? What the hell has happened to "I want to build something, so I'll build it"? Now you have to [1]pay $100 for the privilege of reading the mailing list for an open source project? And some guy needs $25,000 just to start it? Guys this is...not good. Can you imagine if apache's kickstarter never got funded? If the linux kernel's didn't?…
Let me get this straight: so a prolific, proven open source contributor makes some money, and the community gets a problem fixed. This is a bad thing? Who loses here? What if Yehuda's company gave him 25% of his time to work on open source - would that be different? He'd get that same $25k (or whatever), and the software would get built (and open sourced). Only difference I can see is the source of the money, so are…
I, for once, don't see a problem with getting paid doing open-source software.
With kickstarter I get an assumption that if for some reason he won't raise enough money - he won't work on the project. That, in my opinion, is wrong. It shouldn't matter if one raises money or not, as long as you like what you're doing. Otherwise why bother in the first place?
Re: Kickstarter: rails.app
#144As much as I like yehuda, he's tackling a non-issue here and I'm at a loss to understand how he even arrived at the project scope as he describes it. Installing Rails on a Mac is largely trivial. It's literally 5 shell-commands, depending on the current level of breakage of rubygems (but that's a different story). Write a tutorial in your blog if you really feel this is hard for newbies. The hard part is installing t…
> he's tackling a non-issue here
IDK. The barriers to entry for RoR on the Mac are pretty high.
I was keenly interested in an open source open government project (Sunlight Foundation). I tried to get it running on my Mac, on my personal time. I had direct expert help (friends who dev using Ruby, Rails, etc.). I understand the tool stack was churning, something about mismatched versions, runtimes, whatever.
I gave up after three weeks.
I don't care care how "awesome" Rails is. If it doesn't work out of the box, like all the LAMPs distros, devs will find something that does.
I hate Spring, Maven, ORM and all the other webby enterprisey Java crap with the passion of a billion burning suns. But the RoR nonsense was a whole 'nother level of insanity.
I'd rather take a bat to the face, or use PHP, than try RoR again.
(I should add that my bad experience was ~1 year ago. Maybe things have improved. Alas, I've moved on to greener pastures.)
Re: Kickstarter: rails.app
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dude, take a step back and forget that you know this stuff already and do it professionally. That list is not easy and far from obvious, even for real programmers coming from other environments, let alone for actual programming beginners. Your list is far from canonical even at this very moment and hasn't even been common for very long. To figure out your list, I have to: 1) know that homebrew is the "right" way to i…
Actually I agree with previous commenter. These steps are easy and only take like 10minutes and give great power handling versions and gemsets to projects. If you are someone who doesn't know what it means you should learn. Isn't that what a programmer needs to do?
The steps aren't hard, it's knowing which ones to do that is hard. And yes, you should learn what all those things mean and why everyone does them, but it shouldn't be the very first thing you learn.
Re: Kickstarter: rails.app
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
But in practice it's almost never that simple. Install Xcode; 1) Install in App Store 2) Still not actually installed, start it, that finished the installation 3) You still don't have what you need, find where they've moved "install command line tools" to and install that 4)The compiler you have isn't the right one as Lion no longer has GCC as its default compiler and you want to use RVM 5) ...... Once you've done it…
but the first few times it can easily be half a day lost just trying to get the environment working. The above steps are reasonably robust and implicitly teach you things about your programming environment that you must learn (or at least have seen) as early as possible. We should decidedly not dumb that down. There must be one canonical installation procedure for everyone and it must be as easy as above. There must…
You don't need to learn those things as early as possible. You need to learn them eventually, as you're getting closer to gaining expertise. Accidental complexity early along the road to expertise is a hinderance not a help.
The complexities of setting up a system so you can develop rails on it exist to solve problems that experts have discovered through years of working with the system, but which people coming to it fresh don't, and shouldn't need to, know that they have yet.
Re: Kickstarter: rails.app
#147Please excuse the language, but what the fuck is happening to our world right now? What the hell has happened to "I want to build something, so I'll build it"? Now you have to [1]pay $100 for the privilege of reading the mailing list for an open source project? And some guy needs $25,000 just to start it? Guys this is...not good. Can you imagine if apache's kickstarter never got funded? If the linux kernel's didn't?…
A lot of programmers have hangups about money. Consider whether you do as well, and if so whether this is something you've purposefully chosen because you really like what it does for your life or whether it is just accidental. If it is accidental, you may want to consider stopping. a) $25k is not a lot of money for very well-known programmers. There are fairly straightforward methods to get that much in a month (a s…
a) $25k is not a lot of money for very well-known programmers.
What if Linus said, "I have this great idea for a version control system, but I need the community to raise $100k to make it happen"? Of course he would never do that. The reason for making git was to give the kernel project what it needed for a version control system. Linus' time is at least an order of magnitude more valuable than Yahuda Katz' time. Just as git arguably makes the kernel project more successful, rails.app ought to make Rails more popular. Wide deployment of Linux in turn makes Linux developers' skills more valuable, just as wider deployment of Rails enriches Ruby developers.
c) ... Rails was designed to, and succeeds at, making companies great piles of money
d) OSS developers making money by it
That can be said for just about any popular open source project used in the business world.
Re: Kickstarter: rails.app
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
actually I hate to say it but one of the early (2006? 2005?) blog posts about the diff between Python and Ruby was that in Python's console, if you hit "q" or escape or ctrl-C or something, you get an error message like the 'source :rubygems' error message, which says "hit ctrl-D to escape." the blog post was saying this is basically the diff between the two languages, that Python would correct you if it knew what yo…
> in Python's console, if you hit "q" or escape or ctrl-C or something, you get an error message like the 'source :rubygems' error message, which says "hit ctrl-D to escape." Ah, I think I know what you're talking about. I wasn't using Python back then, and I know exit() was added after that (the only way to leave the console before that was to Ctrl-D), but when you type "exit" in the console, Python responds: Use ex…
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Re: Kickstarter: rails.app
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of programmers have hangups about money. Consider whether you do as well, and if so whether this is something you've purposefully chosen because you really like what it does for your life or whether it is just accidental. If it is accidental, you may want to consider stopping. a) $25k is not a lot of money for very well-known programmers. There are fairly straightforward methods to get that much in a month (a s…
a) $25k is not a lot of money for very well-known programmers. What if Linus said, "I have this great idea for a version control system, but I need the community to raise $100k to make it happen"? Of course he would never do that. The reason for making git was to give the kernel project what it needed for a version control system. Linus' time is at least an order of magnitude more valuable than Yahuda Katz' time. Jus…
> Of course he would never do that.
Why? Maybe he was paid by the linux foundation during that time? Other sources of income? The gratuit "of course" is not clear to me.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you try to say, but: " rails.app ought to make Rails more popular [...] wider deployment of Rails enriches Ruby developers". Are you saying that Yehuda should not make money from his efforts, but the Ruby developers in turn can use the results naturally for their gain?
Re: Kickstarter: rails.app
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me get this straight: so a prolific, proven open source contributor makes some money, and the community gets a problem fixed. This is a bad thing? Who loses here? What if Yehuda's company gave him 25% of his time to work on open source - would that be different? He'd get that same $25k (or whatever), and the software would get built (and open sourced). Only difference I can see is the source of the money, so are…
I, for once, don't see a problem with getting paid doing open-source software. With kickstarter I get an assumption that if for some reason he won't raise enough money - he won't work on the project. That, in my opinion, is wrong. It shouldn't matter if one raises money or not, as long as you like what you're doing. Otherwise why bother in the first place?
Opportunity cost. If the world can't come up with $25k to fund this project, then it must not actually have enough of a market to be worth Yehuda's time. He can go find something else to do for $25k worth of his time that will likely benefit someone more than this would have.
It's not like we're investing $25k of angel funds to have him build something that he is then going to sell for $500k without sharing the profits. We're simply paying the living expenses of someone who wants to solve a perceived need for the development community.