Computer programming is complicated, Rails is not

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

Taryn East writes:

A whole slew of controversy has been stirred up with the post: What the hell is happening to rails – which managed to top the hackernews charts for quite a while last week.

It basically gave vent to a lot of concern in the rails community that rails is becoming too difficult to learn, and that may be scaring off newbies.

The new rails has certainly been in a great state of flux – and pushes the whole framework in a new direction. Whether or not you like that direction is one thing – but the fact that it is such a big change makes it difficult to know where to start if you’re coming into the community for the first time.

I recently had an eye-opening experience at a hack-day where I suggested rails as a platform-of-choice for us to use… then spent the entire day helping one guy just get a basic rails stack up and running on his laptop, and then I still had to explain how to actually use it.. This isn’t as easy a I remember when I first began.

One of the big benefits of original plain-ole-C was that anybody could learn the entirety of the language and keep it in their head all at one time. Contrast that with any of the big enterprise languages, which require a long ramp-up time even just to learn everything that is available in the basic suites. Not that having less is better – but it does make the early-learning stages much quicker… so I can see the point being made here.

In any case – I think the gist of the post/discussion is worry over the potential dilution of the framework. If we want to be all things to all people – it means a lot of work to genericise the platform, and that means big changes.

From the point of view of someone who does not know computer programming, all of programming is complicated. The complexity of Rails is a very small layer on top of a vast subject.

I’m mostly new to Ruby, and also Rails. It does not strike me as complicated, though I have the benefit of having worked with other MVC frameworks.

I worked on a Rails project in 2006. I did not work with Rails for 4 years. Rails is more complicated in 2011 than it was in 2006. The problem is not so much with the framework, as with the whole ecosystem: bundler, gems, the Gemfile, dependency management. And a lot of these new systems were put in place to manage points of pain. In some ways, Rails is easier to work with now than it was in 2006. But it takes a bit of effort to realize how bundler and Gemfiles solve points of pain.

Post external references

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    http://rubyglasses.blogspot.com/2011/06/what-hell-is-happening-with-rails.html
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