Things that Ruby on Rails people tell you • Hacker News Board

Re: Things that Ruby on Rails people tell you

#41

Post by nicholassmith » Sat, Nov 10, 2012, 6:49 PM UTC

irahul wrote: post #34

brugidou wrote: post #17

.NET tooling can't compete with any unix + ruby tooling. I use .NET everyday I work with NuGet & co and it stinks. It is miles away from being mature and robust (even with VS2012). I was a RoR dev before and loved it, now I just hate .NET at work because of it's OS (Windows) and tools (VS, NuGet, MSBuild...). We don't use MVC though.

> tools (VS, NuGet, MSBuild...). I don't know about NuGet or MSBuild, but back then when I used VS for misc tasks, it used to run circles around Eclipse or Netbeans.

Running circles around Eclipse and Netbeans is not tricky really, they're both horrifying to use on a regular basis.

Re: Things that Ruby on Rails people tell you

#42

Post by cheald » Sat, Nov 10, 2012, 6:58 PM UTC

jiayo wrote: post #40

btilly wrote: post #18

Disclaimer: I came to hate Microsoft back when it was first fashionable to do so. I've grown up, and still don't like them. Here is my pet peeve. MVC is a well-understood idea in web development that traces its inspiration back to Smalltalk in the 70s. There are many MVC frameworks in many languages, which differ in various details. All of which, to avoid confusion, called themselves things other than MVC. Examples i…

Rails calls themselves MVC: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html#the-mvc-a... I don't see the issue with calling it "ASP.NET MVC". The Visual Basic event-driven style of programming is fundamentally different from MVC. Calling it MVC provides context. Would you have preferred they come up with a "cute" name that doesn't explain what it is?

Rails claims to implement the MVC design patterns. It does not claim to be named "Ruby on Rails MVC".

Re: Things that Ruby on Rails people tell you

#43

Post by s_kilk » Sat, Nov 10, 2012, 7:12 PM UTC

brugidou wrote: post #17

.NET tooling can't compete with any unix + ruby tooling. I use .NET everyday I work with NuGet & co and it stinks. It is miles away from being mature and robust (even with VS2012). I was a RoR dev before and loved it, now I just hate .NET at work because of it's OS (Windows) and tools (VS, NuGet, MSBuild...). We don't use MVC though.

As a dual-wielding RoR/.Net dev, I'm on the fence about this, on the one hand MSbuild and Nuget are a pale immitation of the tools we find in Rub/posix/foss land, but I do think VS is quite a powerful tool when held correctly. Ultimately I enjoy working in both environments, but each for differnt reasons.

Re: Things that Ruby on Rails people tell you

#44

Post by knowtheory » Sat, Nov 10, 2012, 7:12 PM UTC

pyrotechnick wrote: post #28

Karunamon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On shaky legal ground, IIRC.

Correct. http://www.infoq.com/articles/java-dotnet-patents But what isn't? Plenty of Rails is sitting atop JRuby and friends. Nothing is immune. Don't get me wrong. I'm not a massive supporter of .NET (outside of XNA) by any means. My point is if legal issues are what you're looking for; you'll find them; everywhere. It's just all so ubiquitous it's simply not cause for concern. Anything can be made to be seen as ill…

This is by and large a red-herring.

Unless your Ruby app is leveraging JRuby's integration with Java... you can just take your Ruby app, fire it up on Rubinius or MRI, and you're no worse for wear.

Re: Things that Ruby on Rails people tell you

#45

Post by utnick » Sat, Nov 10, 2012, 7:14 PM UTC

The big thing that rails has that .NET doesn't are the vast number of open source engines and plugins available.

For examples see here: https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/ , nothing like this really exists in the .net ecosystem, especially something akin to active record plugins, so you have to roll your own stuff a lot of the time when you could just use a plugin in rails.

Also, it seems like a lot of the useful .net stuff like mvc, nuget, entity framework are kind of clones of stuff that exist in the rails ecosystem already, so you are always going to be a bit behind the curve.

Re: Things that Ruby on Rails people tell you

#46

Post by vidarh » Sat, Nov 10, 2012, 7:17 PM UTC

jhspaybar wrote: post #39

As someone who has developed in Java, .Net, PHP, Python, Node.js, and Ruby on Rails for web projects, I must say what sells me on RoR is the nature of the language and ActiveRecord. My god, ActiveRecord is AMAZING. Sometimes I just don't have the option to build something in Rails(for example building internal API's that have to be written in Java for a number of reasons), but given the choice I will choose a Ruby or…

I find it peculiar that anyone would describe ActiveRecord that way. In my eyes it's a behind-the-curve ORM based on the most basic ORM pattern available from Fowler's "Enterprise Application Architecture", and it seems most of the people _using_ AR never read it and have not thought at all about the tradeoffs vs. other ORM patterns (such as Data Mapper ; before anyone mentions the Ruby DataMapper ORM: That one doesn't actually implement the Data Mapper pattern).

I particularly dislike the way it tends to result in code that is littered with leaky database abstractions where schema details tends to find its way into peoples controllers and views because it encourages people to call AR methods on model objects directly instead of even trying to encapsulate.

Ruby is my favorite language, but Active Record is one of the things I hold greatly against Rails, not only for AR itself, but for the inspiration it provided to many other Ruby ORM's, that while they may improve on various aspects still to a large extent also end up encouraging leaking implementation details for your models all over the place.

It'd be great if even 10% of the people using (and writing, it would seem, given that e.g. the Ruby ORM "Data Mapper" doesn't implement the Data Mapper pattern at all) these ORM's actually read the relevant chapters of EAA and pondered a bit on how it related to their applications.

Re: Things that Ruby on Rails people tell you

#47

Post by cheald » Sat, Nov 10, 2012, 7:18 PM UTC

Perhaps this has changed in the last couple of years, but the last time I was in .NET land, the most glaring difference between the two was the community.

Rails, being built upon a foundation of open source, instills a strong open source ethos into its community. The amount of free, permissively-licensed open source libraries available for use with Rails is staggering. Rails' entire ecosystem, down to the preferred OS kernel, is open source and free. The buy-in to work with Rails is exactly $0. This produces a community who almost rabidly shares code and knowledge as permissively as possible.

Compare this to ASP.NET, where, until recently, there was a buy-in for everything, and you had to pony up a fair bit of cash just to play in the sandbox. In the ASP.NET world, everyone wants their $15 or $50 or $500 for every little bit of code or whatnot. The entire ecosystem feels like it's composed of people with an "enterprise" mindset who expect that everything should be paid for. This massively hampers growth of the technology and its community. It is directly antithetical to the open source ideals that have catapulted Rails to where it is today.

Any time I had tried searching for solutions to .NET problems, they were behind paywalls, behind license restrictions, or otherwise hidden away. When I search for solutions to Rails problems, they're on StackOverflow and Github. Where is the GitHub equivalent of ASP.NET MVC projects? The OP argues that the lack of SO questions is a good thing. I'd suggest that instead, perhaps it's symptomatic of the community's attitude towards distribution of knowledge.

Like I said, the last time I worked with ASP.NET was a couple of years ago, so perhaps this has changed by now, but if it has, it'd be a tectonic shift, and I'm rather doubtful that an entire ecosystem can change like that in such a relatively short amount of time.

Re: Things that Ruby on Rails people tell you

#48

Post by dagw » Sat, Nov 10, 2012, 7:20 PM UTC

MattRogish wrote: post #26

themgt wrote: post #22

I doubt most Rails developers spend much time thinking about .NET There's a large and growing number of useful, productive high-level languages, frameworks, databases, webservers, tooling, etc. The thing they all have in common is they're open source, they can be used on a variety of POSIX-compatible operating systems and distros, they're often used together, share underlying libraries, and help build off each other'…

Indeed. I've been a developer for about 13 years. The last 6 and change has been doing Rails and JS app development (I started out doing VC++ apps for Windows). I haven't thought about MS stack at all since about 2002. And I don't recall any presentations at RailsConf this year about .NET. No one in my circles even gives .NET a second thought. ASP MVC may be pretty rad, but I personally hate C# (Ruby is an amazingly…

I personally hate C# (Ruby is an amazingly better language)

Why? I've spent the best part of the last 5 years programming python and JavaScript. Recently however a new project has shown up where I might have to use C# and I'm really excited. From what I've seen and based on the little tests I've done, C# looks like an awesome language. Striking a prefect balance between the being too dynamic and free from and being too rigid. What is it about C# that you "hate"?

Re: Things that Ruby on Rails people tell you

#49

Post by cheald » Sat, Nov 10, 2012, 7:25 PM UTC

irahul wrote: post #34

brugidou wrote: post #17

.NET tooling can't compete with any unix + ruby tooling. I use .NET everyday I work with NuGet & co and it stinks. It is miles away from being mature and robust (even with VS2012). I was a RoR dev before and loved it, now I just hate .NET at work because of it's OS (Windows) and tools (VS, NuGet, MSBuild...). We don't use MVC though.

> tools (VS, NuGet, MSBuild...). I don't know about NuGet or MSBuild, but back then when I used VS for misc tasks, it used to run circles around Eclipse or Netbeans.

VS is a really solid IDE - one of the best available, I'd say, if it supports what you're working in.

Rails really doesn't do "IDE" well, but that's because its entire toolchain is built to be used independently of an IDE.

(Edit: There's Rubymine, which is actually pretty decent, but I usually just stick with Sublime and my console because it ends up being faster anyhow)

Re: Things that Ruby on Rails people tell you

#50

Post by losvedir » Sat, Nov 10, 2012, 8:06 PM UTC

> Myth 1: It's Easier to Bootstrap a Project In Rails

To me, "bootstrapping a project" includes source control and hosting. I absolutely adore the Rails/Heroku/GitHub trifecta.

I don't really know how this compares to what .NET MVC and VS can provide. Do they make it equally easy to get something live online with collaborators? Going to Project -> New is one thing, but only a small step in getting a project started.