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Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)

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

#121

Post by DocSavage »

throwanem wrote: post #114
DocSavage wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 outs…

Then maybe you shouldn’t generalize your one viewpoint to say that early Ruby/Rails was not a worthy community for professionals or of use to people who practice jointly valued skills like entrepreneurship.

It’s also odd to see your long rant of whimsical vs professional when some of the most well-known companies were built with that community of so-called non-professionals. We have a difference in opinion on what constitutes “professional”.

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

#122

Post by norir »

Tainnor wrote: post #111
throwanem wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When a main goal to maximize a subjective trait such as "developer happiness," you are almost certain to cause the opposite for a significant portion of your users. This is the curse of inherited ruby code.

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

#123

Post by gensym »

throwanem wrote: post #119
gensym wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

LOL. I feel like a geezer whenever I talk to people about what enterprise software was before RoR came along. XML. So much XML. Do you think that you should write XML in order to query data from a DB with a perfectly serviceable query language? People sure did think that in 2001!

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

#124

Post by throwanem »

DocSavage wrote: post #121
throwanem wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 outs…

Then maybe you shouldn’t generalize your one viewpoint to say that early Ruby/Rails was not a worthy community for professionals or of use to people who practice jointly valued skills like entrepreneurship. It’s also odd to see your long rant of whimsical vs professional when some of the most well-known companies were built with that community of so-called non-professionals. We have a difference in opinion on what co…

The entire point I'm making is that, however well that community may have fulfilled those roles for people embedded in the social context of its ingroup, it did a lousy-to-failing job of the same outside that circle.

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

#125

Post by hereonout2 »

throwanem wrote: post #120
Tainnor wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

But rails was modern backend development back then, it offered an alternative to a world full of mod_perl, PHP4, Java servlets with JSP and XSLT.

Having had the displeasure of working on all those stacks it's hard to overstate how transformative rails was at the time for me.

Built in unit testing is one thing, not having to write a java class to expose a custom function to an xslt processor in order to format a string is something else.

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

#126

Post by ertian »

throwanem wrote: post #97
ertian wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main criticism is just that your whole point comes down to "they did things in a way I didn't like!" So what? They had different personalities or different goals. When I found _why's guide back in 2004 or whatever, at a boring job that involved a lot of sitting around, I learned Ruby as a side effect of poking through this odd little text. That introduced me to concepts I hadn't come across at school learning Java…

Any criticism boiled down far enough ends up in "they did things in a way I didn't like". It's not a meaningful response. In this case, the criticism was in response to a perspective on these past events that is in my view overly informed by nostalgia, and while I don't make a general habit of snatching rose-colored glasses off anyone's face, in a public setting and especially in this public setting it is not unreaso…

I think better criticism is, well, constructive. "Here's a better way to accomplish what they're attempting", not "That's all crap because I don't like it". And before you can do that, I think you have to understand what it is they're attempting.

I'm a professional programmer now, and I much prefer simple, straightforward manuals with clear descriptions. If I was trying to get work done, a bunch of whimsical cartoons would only get in the way. I would have no use for _why's guide today. Even way back when, I was annoyed by the ratio of text and cartoons to actual code & lessons.

But the world isn't made up entirely of professional programmers trying to get work done. There are teenagers who are curious about programming but intimidated by thick volumes and spare language websites pointing at API references. There are workers sick of their current career and looking for something new, and bored stay-at-home spouses. Whimsical guides to quirky languages are for them, not you.

I don't think anybody is pointing to _why's guide as a reference for people who need to write software for self-driving cars or aircraft telemetry in the immediate future. Nobody is arguing that all programming material must be whimsical and quirky. But there was room in the world for a cute little guide to catch newbie or non programmers and teach them a bit. The guide was just an on-ramp, and the community that surrounded it was just a bunch of newcomers fooling around, not Serious Programmers™. That's all it ever was. And in spite of that: a lot of good ideas came from that community, as others have pointed out elsewhere in this thread. A lot of them went on to be Serious Programmers.

I'm not under the impression that you're criticizing me. I read a chunk of _why's guide before I got bored, and then used Ruby for some hobby projects for a couple years nearly two decades ago, before switching to more robust languages: my identity isn't tied up in either of them. I feel like a bystander sitting on a park bench sipping coffee, witnessing you yelling at a group of kids dressed up as an anime characters or whatever, that they should put on a suit and find a real job goddamn it. Like dude, they're just having fun, and frankly it's none of your damn business. You don't like cosplay? Good for you. But maybe chill out a bit and stop yelling at strangers that they're living their life wrong.

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

#127

Post by throwanem »

gensym wrote: post #123
throwanem wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

LOL. I feel like a geezer whenever I talk to people about what enterprise software was before RoR came along. XML. So much XML. Do you think that you should write XML in order to query data from a DB with a perfectly serviceable query language? People sure did think that in 2001!

You joke, but honestly, it's still the same class of problem. I don't think I should write TypeScript in order to query a DB with a perfectly serviceable query language, either, and I've seen so much time get spent on dealing with the headaches condign upon leaky abstractions to render the productivity benefits claimed by ORM proponents transparently nonsensical. And yet...

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

#128

Post by local_crmdgeon »

rjbwork wrote: post #84
local_crmdgeon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Honestly, internet of weirdos that feels separate from the real world is on private discords now. I pluck people from various semi-public communities that seem cool and build cool private communities.

Those discords are full of "weirdos" who are all exactly the same. I'm talking about the self hosted blogs about how the moon landing is fake that also explained how to emulate NES games, BBS' etc.

Every Discord I've seen is just a bunch of Zoomer communist furries which, while not exactly your average bunch, are all very similar to each other and everyone on Twitter and Mastodon.

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

#129

Post by User23 »

throwanem wrote: post #97
ertian wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main criticism is just that your whole point comes down to "they did things in a way I didn't like!" So what? They had different personalities or different goals. When I found _why's guide back in 2004 or whatever, at a boring job that involved a lot of sitting around, I learned Ruby as a side effect of poking through this odd little text. That introduced me to concepts I hadn't come across at school learning Java…

Any criticism boiled down far enough ends up in "they did things in a way I didn't like". It's not a meaningful response. In this case, the criticism was in response to a perspective on these past events that is in my view overly informed by nostalgia, and while I don't make a general habit of snatching rose-colored glasses off anyone's face, in a public setting and especially in this public setting it is not unreaso…

> Any criticism boiled down far enough ends up in "they did things in a way I didn't like". It's not a meaningful response.

Objectively false. Although, granted, much criticism does fall in that category and it's generally worthless. However some criticism is "they did things in a way that was strictly worse than this other alternative that I will describe in actionable detail."

Interestingly enough, virtually all unsolicited criticism falls in the former category.

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

#130

Post by justinator »

astrange wrote: post #73
q845712 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly at the time I remember getting weird twee/precious vibes from the Ruby community and I wasn't particularly interested in it or Rails. I only discovered _why's poignant guide later after I had to learn Rails on the job, and to be honest I never finished it. I still strongly prefer the worldview, circumstances, mindset, etc. where that kind of content is written, read, and celebrated over today's focus on Infl…

I seem to remember multiple incidents where Rails programmers complained that everyone at the conference they went to was playing Werewolf instead of sticking to the topic. It made me wonder what kind of community would lead to that. As for _why, there is nothing special about him. If you need an overly precious twee white guy, we have a natural source of them called the city of Portland. You can go find another ten…

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