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Rails 3 : Vaporware To Awesome

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Re: Rails 3 : Vaporware To Awesome

#31

Post by ilaksh »

gills wrote: post #27
ilaksh wrote: post #15

Rails 3 is waayy faster and better then. Rails in general is great. Its really got the abstraction thing and taking into consideration crazy things like developments in software engineering practices and programming languages. Having said that, I don't really know much about Rails. This comment is not about Rails. I just have to tell people because I keep thinking about something and almost no one seems to get it and…

There is probably a lively discussion or possibly a flamewar to be had on your topic. Unfortunately, it is totally unrelated to the topic of this thread. If you want to talk about this other thing, why not post it on a blog and submit to HN?

I have posted this type of thing all over the internet. Sometimes I get flamed, usually I just get ignored. I was hoping maybe people that were on top of Rails development might be different.

I was wrong.

Re: Rails 3 : Vaporware To Awesome

#32

Post by [deleted] »

gills wrote: post #27
ilaksh wrote: post #15

Rails 3 is waayy faster and better then. Rails in general is great. Its really got the abstraction thing and taking into consideration crazy things like developments in software engineering practices and programming languages. Having said that, I don't really know much about Rails. This comment is not about Rails. I just have to tell people because I keep thinking about something and almost no one seems to get it and…

There is probably a lively discussion or possibly a flamewar to be had on your topic. Unfortunately, it is totally unrelated to the topic of this thread. If you want to talk about this other thing, why not post it on a blog and submit to HN?

[deleted]

Re: Rails 3 : Vaporware To Awesome

#33

Post by benatkin »

ilaksh wrote: post #31
gills wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is probably a lively discussion or possibly a flamewar to be had on your topic. Unfortunately, it is totally unrelated to the topic of this thread. If you want to talk about this other thing, why not post it on a blog and submit to HN?

I have posted this type of thing all over the internet. Sometimes I get flamed, usually I just get ignored. I was hoping maybe people that were on top of Rails development might be different. I was wrong.

Well, rails isn't the only thing out there. Keep trying!

Re: Rails 3 : Vaporware To Awesome

#34

Post by gvb »

patio11 wrote: post #23
Maciek416 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how I've felt about it too. Back when it came out, Rails was very easy to fit into your brain in the course of a day or two of absorption, but now it's a very large collection of ideas, DSLs and overall lingo. It's probably more than a little bit overwhelming to newcomers, and even some of those of us who come back to it every year and scratch our heads in awe at just how big the Rails universe has become. I a…

The thing I like about Rails is, unlike some technology stacks I could name (why hello there Enterprise Java), you don't have to know it all on day one. The first version of my site was an awful lot like Baby's First Bookstore, Rails 2007 Edition. It has gradually accumulated more features and sophistication as I've grown as a web programmer. A lot of the complexity in Rails is hidden until you need it. If you don't…

The term I like (don't know where I picked it up) is "discoverable." The simple things are easy, but you can discover over time how to do the complex things. This has two benefits: the obvious benefit is that it allows the user to be productive immediately, without training, without having to memorize a manual. The "hidden" benefit is that the program becomes an adventure game... it continues to surprise, delight, and reward the user long after the excitement of the initial purchase has faded.

IMHO, this is Apple's "secret sauce." Their hardware and software is just hardware and software, it can be mimicked. The thing that sets their hw/sw apart is its discoverability, and that is very, very hard to copy because it is a thought process, a concept, a zen.

Jason Fried makes this point in SvN: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1561-why-you-shouldnt-copy-us... (with a recursive reference to HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=469940 :-).

Re: Rails 3 : Vaporware To Awesome

#35

Post by _pius »

ilaksh wrote: post #15

Rails 3 is waayy faster and better then. Rails in general is great. Its really got the abstraction thing and taking into consideration crazy things like developments in software engineering practices and programming languages. Having said that, I don't really know much about Rails. This comment is not about Rails. I just have to tell people because I keep thinking about something and almost no one seems to get it and…

This reminds me of the Atlas connections interface. (see screencast: http://280atlas.com/what.php)

How does that compare to your vision?

Re: Rails 3 : Vaporware To Awesome

#36

Post by mrduncan »

dboyd wrote: post #25
gfodor wrote: post #11

Looks really cool. It's definitely not cool though that Yehuda's keeps saying things like "Sinatra has failed because...", and "because Prototype sucks..." and so on. I'm only half way through the video, but it really bothers me when smart software developers disparage other open source projects that came before the latest shiny framework or tool. Especially when it's to brag about whatever project it is that they're…

Yehuda didn't simply say that Sinatra failed. What he said was that Sinatra (and other similar projects) failed to achieve a critical mass of support. The reason for this failure was because these projects were trying to do fundamentally different things than what most people were actually doing with Rails at the time, and as a result, they didn't catch on. This statement was made in comparison to merb, which succeed…

I haven't had a chance to watch the video yet, but one correction - John Resig is the original author of jQuery, Yehuda is on the core team.

Re: Rails 3 : Vaporware To Awesome

#38

Post by moe »

oomkiller wrote: post #28
moe wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sound quality on that is.. unbearable.

I second this! I also looked at the other video's SDRuby has up, and all of them I have tested are also horrible. If someone from SDRuby is here, FIX YOUR AUDIO!! It sounds like my dad's AM talk radio going through a tunnel!

I would also like a fix. It sounds like someone simply encoded the video with way too strong audio-compression - the original material is probably fine.

I'm very interested in the talk but it's near impossible to understand him and the warbling noise gives me instant-headache. No way for me to consume it as it is.

Re: Rails 3 : Vaporware To Awesome

#39

Post by jamesbritt »

dboyd wrote: post #25
gfodor wrote: post #11

Looks really cool. It's definitely not cool though that Yehuda's keeps saying things like "Sinatra has failed because...", and "because Prototype sucks..." and so on. I'm only half way through the video, but it really bothers me when smart software developers disparage other open source projects that came before the latest shiny framework or tool. Especially when it's to brag about whatever project it is that they're…

Yehuda didn't simply say that Sinatra failed. What he said was that Sinatra (and other similar projects) failed to achieve a critical mass of support. The reason for this failure was because these projects were trying to do fundamentally different things than what most people were actually doing with Rails at the time, and as a result, they didn't catch on. This statement was made in comparison to merb, which succeed…

"This was largely because merb attempted to do much the same things that Rails was trying to do, but to do them in a much better way."

Or maybe because Merb was done by people already hooked into the Rails community, and so could more easily get the attention of developers who don't otherwise seem interested in exploring other frameworks?

Nitro, for example, predated Merb (it came out at the same time as Rails) and was doing many things better than Rails (multi-threaded, easy to swap out ORMs, no boinking of built-in classes, Rack-like app request processing pipeline before there was Rack; much faster overall), but got almost zero traction. And I don't think it was because people tried it and didn't care for it, but because all the noise was (rather deliberately) about Rails.

There is a "winner takes all" mentality among some Rubyists that leads them to dismiss anything that isn't the clear leader. Sort of like high school kids who are afraid to be seen talking to the nerds because people might think them uncool.

Re: Rails 3 : Vaporware To Awesome

#40

Post by giardini »

ilaksh wrote: post #15

Rails 3 is waayy faster and better then. Rails in general is great. Its really got the abstraction thing and taking into consideration crazy things like developments in software engineering practices and programming languages. Having said that, I don't really know much about Rails. This comment is not about Rails. I just have to tell people because I keep thinking about something and almost no one seems to get it and…

That way lie frameworks such as Visual Studio, Visual Studio, Delphi, PowerBuilder, Oracle Developer, SQL Server Studio, various CASE tools, etc. All good products that remind us that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

While often excellent, these frameworks usually disappear (or morph to new incompatible forms) within a decade leaving behind cast-off skeletons, the underlying code they generated, to be maintained for decades to come.

Programmers seek security in a lingua franca, a common level of coding/specification that they are comfortable with and that they believe will remain useful as long as possible. The programming language level seems to be the sweet spot today. It is no accident that most frameworks generate code at the programming language level.

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