Re:Keep Ruby Weird Again [video]
by christophilus on Tuesday November 01, 2016 @10:00PM
(#12851724)
Explicitness. << This is key. Ruby/Rails just feels really implicit and magical for someone who spent the first 15 years of his career in C++, C#, and JavaScript. (I've only been doing Rails professionally for a year, though, so maybe my opinion will change with more experience.)
That's mostly an effect of Rails. "Convention over configuration" was one of the early mantras, and usually it serves well for such a large API...but sometimes it's just magic.
Ruby itself is a fairly explicit and consistent language. Some of the syntax might seem surprising at first if you haven't bought into the "everything is an object (really)" perspective.
Re:Keep Ruby Weird Again [video]
by matt_kantor on Wednesday November 02, 2016 @03:09AM
(#12852821)
Chef is pretty magical as well. I think it's easy to get carried away with syntax-sugary DSLs at the expense of of straightforwardness in Ruby if you aren't disciplined about simplicity.
I struggle with this a little as newish ruby coder (but not new to coding). The efforts to make a 'nice' interface can interfere with keeping underlying implementations elegant/simple.
Too much focus on the happiness of a dev cranking out new code at the expense of the happiness of developers coming along afterwards trying to understand it.
Ruby is fun to create stuff with, but I kinda prefer the Python culture that tries to drum into devs the importance of readability and explicitness for other developers. As a dev you do far more poring over others code than creating brand new stuff.