Re:Ruby's Exceptional Creatures
by vidarh on Monday January 29, 2024 @05:14AM
(#39174701)
Rails, to me as someone who loves Ruby and use it for "everything" (including my editor, terminal, window manager), is a poster-child for poorly written Ruby.
It creates code bases that seems to have a tendency to turn into sprawling messes. I appreciate that it has driven a lot of people to Ruby, and in that way it's an amazing and impressive success, but recruiters get it somewhat right for the wrong reason when they sometimes list Rails as a "language".
I'm very happy to use "magic" in Ruby, but it should be high-impact, low code, and contained. E.g. I'm very comfortable with the "magic" in my window manager that turns event classes received from the X11 binding into method call on a target class, so that MotionNotify turns into target.on_motion_notify(event) without me having to specify every event class. It's simple, small, and let me cut a lot of code.
A lot of non-Rubyists would hate it, though.
The irony, though, about your complaint is that Rails code is some of the most verbose Ruby code you'll find, because it's geared at making cookie cutter creation of sites easy, and so a lot of patterns involve an excessive separation into vast amounts of low-impact, verbose classes that do way too little (the obsession with some Rails devs of writing "service classes" for things that should just have been a single method, for example, drives me crazy - yes there are valid uses of service classes, no almost no uses of them in Rails apps are reasonable)
It creates code bases that seems to have a tendency to turn into sprawling messes. I appreciate that it has driven a lot of people to Ruby, and in that way it's an amazing and impressive success, but recruiters get it somewhat right for the wrong reason when they sometimes list Rails as a "language".
I'm very happy to use "magic" in Ruby, but it should be high-impact, low code, and contained. E.g. I'm very comfortable with the "magic" in my window manager that turns event classes received from the X11 binding into method call on a target class, so that MotionNotify turns into target.on_motion_notify(event) without me having to specify every event class. It's simple, small, and let me cut a lot of code.
A lot of non-Rubyists would hate it, though.
The irony, though, about your complaint is that Rails code is some of the most verbose Ruby code you'll find, because it's geared at making cookie cutter creation of sites easy, and so a lot of patterns involve an excessive separation into vast amounts of low-impact, verbose classes that do way too little (the obsession with some Rails devs of writing "service classes" for things that should just have been a single method, for example, drives me crazy - yes there are valid uses of service classes, no almost no uses of them in Rails apps are reasonable)