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Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)

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Re: Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)

#111

Post by Tainnor »

throwanem wrote: post #109
Tainnor wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as someone who started out with Ruby and Rails and has since migrated to other stacks... I would never conflate Ruby and Rails. Ruby is a language that took interesting ideas and developed them in a unique way. Today, it doesn't align with my goals 100% anymore (I do like Ruby's focus on expressivity, but not when it comes at the expense of predictability), but I don't think that's Ruby's fault. Rails, by co…

If I've conflated Ruby and Rails, it wasn't by intent. I do think Rails was like it was in large part by direct derivation from, and enshrinement of, Ruby's allergy to rigor - which isn't to say they're the same thing, but that the latter directly predated and heavily informed the former.

Yes, Ruby has always prioritised readability and "developer happiness" over predictability and rigour, but that doesn't mean that it necessarily encouraged incomprehensible meta-frameworks. Sinatra or similar projects show how things can be done more decently in Ruby, while still utilising its malleability in order to create a nice DSL.

Re: Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)

#112

Post by epolanski »

local_crmdgeon wrote: post #55
Arubis wrote: post #14

_why's work was much of what got me into Ruby in the first place. Not so much quirky as proudly both hyperliterate and unhinged, like the computing world's extension of depressed indie bands meeting David Foster Wallace in the early aughts. Most of us that would've been into _why's stuff now have more traditional-looking jobs and responsibilities. But I'm so grateful for what he showed us then, and miss the more genu…

I miss that in general. Everyone has become a Cool Internet Person who acts like a celebrity, or at least in a homogenized way. I miss the internet of weirdos, that felt separate from the real world. I worry a lot that I contributed to how this is now, too, in my professional life.

Internet is still full of weirdos.

What changed are primarily two things:

1) The social media war hasn't been won by those platforms that offered users possibilities to customize their page (MSN spaces, myspace, tumblr still survives) but by pre-canned, limited but simple platforms.

2)Internet citizens are increasingly less anonymous on all those platforms which makes them further unwilling to be unfiltered.

Re: Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)

#113

Post by DocSavage »

throwanem wrote: post #107
DocSavage wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would much rather participate in a community of professionals who've organized themselves around sufficiently overlapping shared intents I thoroughly enjoyed my involvement with early (US) Ruby and Rails folks from the first Rails conf to _why's unusual entertainment to Matz's calm and humble demeanor. People bounced ideas off each other and just enjoyed coding up interesting things. Dave Thomas and the Pragmatic…

I mean, it's usually preferable to be part of an ingroup than of its outgroup, sure. Otherwise, what value in the distinction? But the iron law applies here, too. I wouldn't be so quick to claim Twitter, either, even among zero-interest-rate phenomena more generally. It might be easy to forget these days, but that's been harmful to society on net since long before Musk bought it.

I think you're missing my point. The early Ruby and Rails community I remember was a collection of very smart and explorative programmers who wanted to build cool stuff with this interesting language. People were trying out DSLs -- sure they could've used LISP -- but Ruby's metaprogramming was inviting and was a reason for the succinct Rails syntax which was a selling point compared to say Java's cumbersome approach.

The speed of trying stuff out (even if it wasn't super efficient) why startups used it. So it was a community of highly productive people sharing their love of building new things. That's my memory of that time period.

Re: Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)

#114

Post by throwanem »

DocSavage wrote: post #113
throwanem wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it's usually preferable to be part of an ingroup than of its outgroup, sure. Otherwise, what value in the distinction? But the iron law applies here, too. I wouldn't be so quick to claim Twitter, either, even among zero-interest-rate phenomena more generally. It might be easy to forget these days, but that's been harmful to society on net since long before Musk bought it.

I think you're missing my point. The early Ruby and Rails community I remember was a collection of very smart and explorative programmers who wanted to build cool stuff with this interesting language. People were trying out DSLs -- sure they could've used LISP -- but Ruby's metaprogramming was inviting and was a reason for the succinct Rails syntax which was a selling point compared to say Java's cumbersome approach.…

I'm not missing your point, but I don't see where it constitutes the counterargument that context and framing suggest you mean it to be.

What you're describing here is your perspective from within the small and insular group busily developing and advocating new technology, always focused on the next new thing that was cool and interesting and succinct and powerful. What I'm describing is my perspective from well outside that pale. Both can be true at the same time.

Re: Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)

#115

Post by Tainnor »

lubujackson wrote: post #44
preseinger wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it characterizes programming in a way that is basically incoherent to most stereotypical programmers (i agree with you, for the record, it was gobbledegook to me too) the question is: does programming represent some kind of subjective expression, or some kind of objective precision? why's little zine says it's the former, but that's not how i see it at all programming is, for me, like working on math problems, or bal…

Worth noting that mathematicians also argue over the art vs. science approach to math itself. Ask one what makes a formula "elegant", for example, can lead to some hand-waving that boils down to "you know it when you see it." My take: the art is always about the human communication through the medium. As soon as programming is abstracted beyond the 1s and 0s, every choice represents a mental model for communicating i…

Mathematicians love arguing about which proof is the most elegant or most insightful, and which definitions are the ones that most captivate the essence of a concept (ask three mathematicians from different fields to define Euler's constant e, for example).

So yeah, there is very clearly a human and subjective element in mathematics, even when the results themselves are objective (modulo axioms and inference rules).

Re: Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)

#116

Post by Tainnor »

tyg13 wrote: post #92
preseinger wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

right! and, to build on that: people who see programming as maths understand it fundamentally differently than those who see it as prose, they approach every aspect of programming differently, evaluate "quality" on entirely different metrics, etc. in my experience, this is a major source of friction in programming teams, and deserves to be addressed more directly -- if i had it my way, i'd prefer that those who see p…

As both a writer and someone who has a degree in math, I see the segregation of prose and mathematics into fundamentally different categories as arbitrary, perhaps even incorrect. I see an artistic element to mathematics, just as much as I see a mechanical element to prose. The mechanics of the thing tell us what we can do, the art of it tells us what we want to do. Perhaps even _why we do it.

I find the strict separation of human intellectual activities into "soft" humanities and "hard" sciences kind deeply sad. I'm not claiming that writing is the same thing as performing a physics experiment, but to me, humanity is at its best when it combines both of these elements instead of keeping them apart.

Re: Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)

#117

Post by gensym »

throwanem wrote: post #85
hereonout2 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a lot of quirkiness and egotism then, the cult of personality was rife, not just with project leaders such as DHH but ancillary dramas from folks like Zed Shaw. The stuff from _why was always wacky but some of their projects were also really inspiring for younger programmers, of which I was one. I could take or leave the cartoon foxes but I remember seeing the code for the Camping framework when it was rele…

Ruby itself was tolerably well documented, but that was a rare bright spot, and of limited utility when Rails leveraged the malleability of the language into near incomprehensibility even by the language's own low standard. And while you're not wrong that by spending enough money it was possible to obtain halfway decent documentation for Rails that if you were very lucky might still be mostly applicable after a coupl…

> But since on reflection I'm pretty sure Rails' use of ActiveRecord popularized ORMs in web application development

As someone mired in enterprise web application development in the early oughts, I can tell you this is kind of backwards. ActiveRecord was actually a simplification of the more complex ORM that enterprise software (mostly in Java at the time, but a little bit of Objective C in the banking realm) was using. I _think_ the term "ActiveRecord" was first used in the 2003 book Patterns of Enterprise Architecture, and it was described as a pattern you could use when you didn't need the complexity of a full-blown ORM. For people who had wrestled with Hibernate or WebObjects, ActiveRecord felt like a light-weight sigh of relief.

That said - even as someone who still works on RoR apps - I'm glad we've mostly moved beyond ORMs (primarily by moving beyond objects, which were never a very good fit for representing data in the first place).

Re: Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)

#118

Post by boolueah »

He and I went to high school together, and he was really funny then too. In our seminary class, I would always ask him to play the Peanuts theme song on piano. I loved how he didn’t care what anybody thought and he just did his own thing. I lost track of him after we graduated.

Re: Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)

#119

Post by throwanem »

gensym wrote: post #117
throwanem wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ruby itself was tolerably well documented, but that was a rare bright spot, and of limited utility when Rails leveraged the malleability of the language into near incomprehensibility even by the language's own low standard. And while you're not wrong that by spending enough money it was possible to obtain halfway decent documentation for Rails that if you were very lucky might still be mostly applicable after a coupl…

> But since on reflection I'm pretty sure Rails' use of ActiveRecord popularized ORMs in web application development As someone mired in enterprise web application development in the early oughts, I can tell you this is kind of backwards. ActiveRecord was actually a simplification of the more complex ORM that enterprise software (mostly in Java at the time, but a little bit of Objective C in the banking realm) was us…

Huh, okay, that's fair. ActiveRecord was the first ORM I worked with, and ActiveRecord in 2013 was easily poor enough to color my perspective on the category. I've heard Hibernate criticized before, of course, but I didn't realize it both predated ActiveRecord and was so much worse as to leave ActiveRecord even in its day looking good by comparison.

I still think Rails gets the blame for popularizing the concept, but I suppose that has to be mitigated by prior art making it so easy to popularize - "it's just like what you're used to, but won't make you want to kill yourself to use" is a pretty compelling pitch.

Re: Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)

#120

Post by throwanem »

Tainnor wrote: post #110
throwanem wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ruby itself was tolerably well documented, but that was a rare bright spot, and of limited utility when Rails leveraged the malleability of the language into near incomprehensibility even by the language's own low standard. And while you're not wrong that by spending enough money it was possible to obtain halfway decent documentation for Rails that if you were very lucky might still be mostly applicable after a coupl…

Hibernate predates ActiveRecord, if I'm not mistaken, and to this date I can't decide which of the two I hate more. They both do different things very wrong. So I'm not sure if you can blame ORMs on Rails. Also I'm not sure what you mean by the documentation criticism. I criticised Rails elsewhere in the comments, but I can't really fault it for the documentation, which IMHO was always excellent. And then you also ha…

I'd have loved to know about such a thing at the time! One wonders why none of the people in the various IRC channels and forums where I then sought Rails advice saw fit to mention it.

In entire, albeit mildly grudging, fairness, I do have to concede that Rails introduced me to the concept of unit testing. But I'm still glad I learned modern backend development in the years immediately after Rails peaked, and while the worthwhile was being sorted from the nonsense among the many concepts and approaches that Rails does, for better or worse, deserve credit for having made newly popular.

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