Possibly the dumbest thing I've seen on Hacker News. Is this what this site has come to?
Why I Hate Rails - After six months you’ll be lucky if you have this
21–30 of 38 posts
Re: Why I Hate Rails - After six months you’ll be lucky if you have this
#22Ooh ooh, now write a rant on boiling water being too hot and the price of fuel... If you're comparing Rails to PHP you're doing it wrong. And who seriously builds a Rails app without an understanding of basic CSS and HTML? A few parts seemed to be just thrown in there to pad out the rant if you ask me. I agree that the whole premise of Gems is frustrating and deploying isn't as straight-forward as FTP'ing a folder of…
> And who seriously builds a Rails app without understanding of basic CSS and HTML?
One of the times I was at the Seattle Rails Meetup, 4 of the 8 people there were trying to do this. One of them has been trying to do this for at least 2 years with only puting in a few hours per week. It's been pretty painful to watch.
Re: Why I Hate Rails - After six months you’ll be lucky if you have this
#23Thank you for this, you are absolutely right. I've had to watch a coworker (who's new to Rails) struggle through this same bullshit. After the 5 days it took him to set it up and run our Rails app locally, I showed him Smalltalk's Seaside and how it takes a minute and a half from downloading to having it work, so that at least he would have some perspective of how so far off the Rails experience is from what it could be.
Please keep this up at least until I get to the office tomorrow so I can send him the link. :)
Re: Why I Hate Rails - After six months you’ll be lucky if you have this
#24I was going to suggest PHP/MySQL but a similar argument applies. Those gems sound cool by the way - any analogs in PHP?
Composer? (http://getcomposer.org)
Re: Why I Hate Rails - After six months you’ll be lucky if you have this
#25I've just completed BerkeleyX CS169.1x (Software as a Service)[1] that teaches Rails and I haven't found it to be painful at all. I'm sure that I'm no expert, but I am competent enough to be building a Rails app of my own that utilizes most of the concepts in the OP. The best way to learn it (IMHO) is to just jump in and do a project, learning as you go. I can see how learning web development from scratch with Rails…
That's a great course. Its actually on Coursera for free ... https://www.coursera.org/saas/class ... I did it in April last year; that's how I learnt Ruby & Rails. It is quite fast paced though and you definitely need some decent programming skills to get through.
Re: Why I Hate Rails - After six months you’ll be lucky if you have this
#26I dropped out of college, too. I like to say I ran out of money, and I did to an extent, but I could have made it work. Truth be told I just didn't like it.
Nine months ago, a friend of mine suggested that I consider Rails for a new project I was thinking about. I had never even heard of Rails (remember, this was nine months ago), but I gave it a shot anyway. I started working on my app on Friday night after work, and I followed Michael Hartl's tutorial as a starting point. I had a general idea of the MVC pattern so I was good there, but up until that weekend I'd never written any kind of code other than C#. By Sunday night I had an MVP for my niche ERP that I'd been wanting to build. By the end of that month I'd fleshed it out and sold a license for $$$ to a company in my niche. I've been maintaining it ever since, I've worked as a contractor on Rails projects, and I'm happy.
I'm not special. I'm not some kind of super-programmer. I couldn't even pass college-level calc. I don't want to sound like an ass, killahpriest, but I learned Rails "in a weekend" because I didn't blame my tools for my shortcomings. I didn't just follow instructions; I did my best to understand the steps I was taking. Learning new technologies is like reading books. They all have certain things in common, and if you learn those commonalities, you can pretty much breeze through just about anything. I suppose that's what they try to teach in computer science departments...
Re: Why I Hate Rails - After six months you’ll be lucky if you have this
#27I was going to suggest PHP/MySQL but a similar argument applies. Those gems sound cool by the way - any analogs in PHP?
I use 'pecl' a lot. Eg:
$ pecl install mongo # MongoDB driver
$ pecl install imagick # ImageMagick wrapper
$ pecl install apc # Bytecode cache
There is also pear which I never use, and Composer, which is similar to Bundler (Composer is better IMO).
Re: Why I Hate Rails - After six months you’ll be lucky if you have this
#28I started reading the article and gave up after a bit.
If Gates, Zuck, and everyone are pushing to have programming in grade schools, I fear more articles that are similar.
We all have our strengths and weaknesses. Some of us can wander into a new language, start making a mess but at the end of the day something works. Others, wander into a language, look around, try and slap something together and then blog about how things don't make sense. Put me in a garage with a disassembled motor? I'll be lost, open a book, but I won't blog about it...
At this point you're probably asking what's the point of this comment? I felt the same about the blog. A waste of time.
Re: Why I Hate Rails - After six months you’ll be lucky if you have this
#29Sounds like he's ranting about the difference between using Rails and really mastering Rails.
If you start with knowing php/python and being able to use html, css, and javascript effectively, you should be able to be more productive than not in rails in 3 months.
If you don't know any of this, you will have a hard time and you will find a large amount of the community unwilling to hold your hand as you struggle to figure out the basics.
Re: Why I Hate Rails - After six months you’ll be lucky if you have this
#30I find it interesting to see how many new developers, and perhaps problematically teachers of new developers, set out to learn programming via web development in Rails. I like Rails. Rails enables developers to solve a common class of problems efficiently and productively. There's tremendous demand for developers who can be productive using Rails. Those are all good reasons to learn the language and framework but if I had to go back and learn to program again I wonder if I would have been successful or enjoyed starting with Rails and Ruby.
Providing a beginner friendly environment and introduction to programming was never one of the motivations behind Rails. If that's a role it can play well then that is all the better. I want tools to exist which help more people learn to program and which give them the satisfaction of being able to build useful applications quickly. However I think it unfair to take a framework which set out to make reasonable decisions about a fairly well defined class of problems in order to make experienced developers more productive in that domain and blame it for being a poor platform to learn programming on.
When is it fair to "hate Rails" and when should we being saying "wow, I guess there is a lot to learn about building software"?