Comment by ardit33 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ardit33 | Hacker News Reader

I think there is one clear field that Rails own: attracting the most of douchebags to its community.

True story: In a bar (John Collins)i n SF, few weeks ago, end up striking a conversation with somebody in a bathroom line.

Him: what do you do for work?

Me: I am an engineer. Software engineer.

Him: A Java guy!?! (with a lot of smugginess).

.... right now i am wondering if i have java printed on my front of something. wtf.

Me: umm... no. Java is only one of the languages I know. (I use it most in mobile dev). I also work on python and lua on the server side, and come C too. And you? (i was still surprised by his condescending tone).

Him: I am rails dev! Ruby on Rails (with even more smugginess, borderlining on arrogance).

.... few questions later, i realized this guy was a crock. Didn't know much about closures/blocks, how many databases can you use on rails at a time... etc.

imagine working with people like that. They setup rails, get a simple app going, and they feel they are in top of the world and better then you. If you know java, you are automatically assumed to be be an idiot, and if you don't use rails you must be a boring person.

I think the Rails Community is full of people that suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect. A lot of newbies, who migrated from php, or would have started with php few years ago, have migrated to Ror.

My point is that Rails is just another framework in top of an scripting language which I don't prefer that much. While really nice for basic CRUD apps, as soon as you try to do anything advanced, it shows it's limitations right away. I tried to use Rails, but I have never been attracted to Ruby as primary language.

Then I started using django, but I dropped it soon after my dislike with the way meshes forms and models, and the sheer size of the framework.

I think the lesson I got out of it, is that more than often you just don't need a full blown framework. If you are doing anything highly specialized, a framework will get into your way. If you are doing anything very simple, a full blown framework is just an overkill.

Frameworks like Rails or Django are a perfect fit for most medium complexity type of CRUD apps. If you are doing anything else, better start looking somewhere else, and don't just buy the hype.

It is erroneous to judge the entire Rails community based on your experience with one person.

I used to have much of the same beliefs as you about Rails; Rails is not fit for highly specialized applications, a framework is overkill for very simple projects. It is only after I got further involved in understanding Rails that I understood that the framework is flexible enough to fit complex, simple and specialized apps alike. I challenge you to give me an example of a web application which is too advanced for RoR.

Sure: Example one: I have friends that works in one of the major social sites (not saying the name), and they tried ruby on rail, but failed to scale with it, both feature wise (modilarity), and sheer performance.

They tested side by side, and they had to add almost x2 the amount of servers for the same funcionality.

The mantra of Ror, is computers are cheap, developers/getting into marked is more important. When you are serving millions of users, that mantra quickly becomes expensive and hard to maintain.

They tried this in 2007, and still use ROR in limited capabilities (for some tools).

Example two: Encoding video for potentially hundreds type of formats, for thousands of users at the same time. This is on demand video serving to customers where they have to scale in a two dimensional way (both users, and video formats). Even not trendy among many people in here, Java has one of the best and most advanced multi threading capabilities out there, especially with Java 6. So, they stuck with java for this part of functionality, and actually using Ror only for the wap front end.

Example 3: Any custom search engine, api engine, anything that doesn't fit the CRUD mantra.

Sure you can modify Rails and get it to work for all the above examples, but it will be probably a poor fit for it. A different technology/framework, or just build your own web app without a full blown framework are better choices.

I hate it, when many people equate Web Apps with CRUD Apps, which I think it is a mistake.

We built a video transcoding platform in Rails - http://zencoder.tv and http://flixcloud.com. Of course, it would be stupid for us to try to actually do the encoding in Rails. That's what C is for. But Rails makes a nice lightweight queueing/management platform that can work alongside of other tools.

Each of your examples is a place where Rails isn't appropriate. But each example should be a multi-tier architecture, and Rails can happily cover one or more tier in each case.

>While really nice for basic CRUD apps, as soon as you try to do anything advanced...

And what is there exactly so advanced that you want to do? You have a problem domain object model that you have abstracted as database tables. Is there anything Rails-specific in there? No. Your call, your design.

Then you have to present the objects to the world. Rails gives you REST. You may take it, or you may chose to increase complexity by adding your own methods... Hell, you can even put logic in the controllers, do as you like.

What is exactly bothering you with Rails? Rails just marshals http requests to database and back. Sinatra does the same, but then Rails have more community support and much more of those little snippets of code that just make your life easier. Nobody prevents you from writing your own helpers, if you don't like the Rails' ones.

Rails is just replacement for all the mundane, repeated and brainless tasks of handling those http calls - it lets you focus on the business logic, that's all. I challenge you to invent anything 'advanced' for which Rails (or Django, or Sinatra) are not good enough. The thing is - they are not there to make anything 'advanced'. They release you from managing infrastructure of your app. And 'advanced' stuff is completely up to you.

I think there is one clear field that Rails own: attracting the most of douchebags to its community.

Pot? Meet kettle. With folks like you promoting such stereotypes, I could say the same about this site if I thought the same way as you.

I agree about the developers that Rails attracts. The one job I had with RoR, the employer was technically incompetent and he didn't pay. He was migrating _everything_ over to Ruby on Rails and spoke incessantly about it.

I've also noticed that the Mac crowd is extremely attracted to Rails. That should show us something -- and please don't assume that I mean all users of these techs fall in here, because I know that very intelligent people use both -- but Rails and Mac both seem to attract arrogant, know-nothing hipsters.

That said, frameworks are a pain when they're overused, but they're handy, even in advanced apps, when you simply consider them as a set of macros and convenience functions instead of an entire philosophy. This is something I really love about Pylons; it's there to help out when its needed and it stays out of the way the rest of the time.

This is very similar to my own experience of working with people who prefer Ruby on Rails. The technology is fine, but the culture seems to attract the worst people to work with.

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