Rewrite it in Rails

Re:Rewrite it in Rails by JohnBooty on Monday November 04, 2024 @01:39PM (#42044691)

    This is exacerbated by ruby's tendencies towards 
    "fluent" interfaces, which is actually code for 
    lots of methods that take undocumented hashes of 
    arguments

Well, I hate this too. I've been away from Ruby for 18 months but my impression was that the community has been moving away from that for a long time and toward keyword args (or whatever they're called, I forget)

    and hash access with strings and symbols? nightmare fuel.

What's the alternative? I like hash access with symbols. Prevents typos and the string values for the hashes are interned AFAIK.

    After running a number of rails applications in production 
    for going on a decade, this is really hard,

I don't feel that Ruby is worse than other languages I've used extensively (Ruby, Python, JS, C#) in this regard.

The issue is one's apps dependency graph. You keep dependencies flowing in one direction. Or you do not and you get spaghetti. I have not worked with languages that are really better or worse at this.

To take the example of a typical Rails app: it's very easy to add code to your Model A that depends on Models B, C, and D. Do that in a few models and...boom! spaghetti! Rails does not discourage or warn about this in the slightest.

It's relatively easy to avoid: have a rule that "no model can contain a reference to another model. if you have to do a thing that involves two models, put it in a service class" or some such. Of course, nobody ever does this.

Are there languages and frameworks that encourage/enforce The Right Thing in a more active way?

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Re:Rewrite it in Rails by wkirby on Monday November 04, 2024 @05:04PM (#42046438)

> Are there languages and frameworks that encourage/enforce The Right Thing in a more active way?

I don't think so, as evidenced by the fact that I'm still so pro Rails after a decade of doing this. But that doesn't mean we can't be vocal about the things that still suck.

> I like hash access with symbols

Oh, I vastly prefer symbol access to string access, but this is really a ruby problem, not a rails problem. The fact that I can pass `{ "foo" => "bar" }` and `{ foo: "bar" }`, and my method has to either call `with_indifferent_access` or _strictly_ enforce being called with one of the two access types is a huge footgun, because improper access doesn't result in an error, it just results in a `nil`.

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