I Love Ruby - Hackdot

Re:I Love Ruby by lloeki on Tuesday December 19, 2023 @04:34AM (#38693604)

Agreed. Ruby is not Rails in so many ways, even on philosophical grounds. Rails is full of magic, implicitness, and conventions, which enables a great deal of very speedy development but also becomes† a minefield if you steer away from The Way; while plain Ruby is very explicit and in plain sight, there's no magic. It's a blank page, an open field, it's raw material for creative ground.

Rack or Minitest for example are very Ruby. RSpec on the other hand is full of Railsy magic, just yesterday testing some threaded stuff I was bit by `let` because it has concurrency consequences, and the magic becomes darkness as you have to look behind the curtain and beat it into submission in roundabout ways that obscure the thing you're actually doing.

† or sometimes is a minefield, all by itself, like this nonsense: https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/1512cf2ba578282c898b8eb6...

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Re:I Love Ruby by rezonant on Tuesday December 19, 2023 @06:21AM (#38694295)

> also becomes† a minefield if you steer away from The Way

Reminds me of Angular vs React-- In my opinion it's much easier to get immediately productive in React, but it's very easy to produce a rats nest over time if you aren't experienced with the framework. Versus Angular which has a lot of upfront learning curve, but it's prescribed structure makes it fairly easy to scale out the app over time.

Rails is definitely more like React in this respect. It turns out you can absolutely color outside the lines and still enjoy the speediness, but it's not something that I experienced devs should try to do without making a huge mess.

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