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Comment by bingobangobongo | Hacker News Reader

> impossible to maintain expert level skills in more than one or two language + library environments

And the crappier your language and libraries, the more time it takes to be an "expert."

By this definition, Ruby/Rails are pretty crappy (I kind of disagree). As a newcomer, the amount of stuff going on in a Rails app and the stack trace when there's an error are pretty overwhelming. Meanwhile, people expound on how simple and elegant Rails is. Lately I've been thinking that this is because those people started using it 5 years ago when it was small and their knowledge has built incrementally with the environment.

My other theory is that it's a lot harder to track down bugs for a newcomer because like C (and unlike Python in most cases), importing functionality from another file is implicit. That is, when you 'require' a bunch of files, there's no indication which functions are coming from where. For me, this is one of the things Python solves marvelously (it's generally considered bad form to 'import *').

Rails is pretty crappy if you ask me. It's "omakase" which is Japanese for "acts according to what DHH wants despite what the community wants". And there's a lot of magic happening that isn't explained very well. There are better frameworks in Ruby. Ruby itself doesn't take all that long to be an expert at.

Though I could argue that all the languages pretty much take the same amount of time to become an expert. Just because some languages are supposedly higher-level than others doesn't mean that the complexity they allow you to tackle (and associated challenges as a programmer or "expert") is any less.

Especially since being a good programmer is more about design, choice of interfaces, reactivity to change, etc. which are by definition language agnostic.

I firmly disagree that Ruby requires any less effort than say C, C++, Java or LISP to become an expert.

I didn't mean to say that Ruby was less complex than C, I meant to say that if you take out the magic it is comprehensable and one can be good at it quickly enough just like a straightforward language like C. I agree that learning design, etc. is the real key in any language, thanks for pointing that out, because that's what everyone should focus on.

Ruby doesn't take long to be productive in. It is an utter pain to become expert in, for any reasonable definition of "expert". Fortunately it's fun enough that I don't mind the slog.

>Rails is pretty crappy if you ask me. It's "omakase" which is Japanese for "acts according to what DHH wants despite what the community wants".

This sounds great. I'd hate software made in the way some "community" wants. Community is the other name for committee.

"it's a lot harder to track down bugs for a newcomer"

This is FUD. It's a different way of doing things, not harder. I live inside Pry which makes it rather easy to figure out what's going on.

That's kind of what I'm talking about. I've never heard of Pry. With Rails I have to learn about the 100 most common gems (devise, paperclip, mongomapper or mongoid), Pry (thanks for that), bundler, rvm, and ActionEverything before I can be productive (or understand a simple app) . With Node.js, something newer with less "maturity", I figure out npm and I'm good to go.

I really don't think it's FUD to say that Rails has gotten much bigger in the past 5 years, and it's definitely not FUD to say that as codebases and tooling grows, so does barrier to entry.

The specific thing I guess you're objecting to is that it's harder for a noob to understand implicit imports and where something is coming from if you don't know much about what you're importing. If you use a tool to solve that language deficiency, that doesn't remove the deficiency from the language. By that logic, adding an IDE to Java makes it a very concise language.

Most of what you said above is a strawman. I said one specific thing.

"it's a lot harder to track down bugs for a newcomer"

This statement is FUD. You seem to be defining "language deficiency" as "hard for a noob before they become proficient". I think that is absurd.

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