RoR creator sparks new “death of coding by hand” debate
The creator of Ruby on Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson, caused quite a stir last week with comments in his Rails World keynote, when he revealed that coding by hand is dead at his company, 37signals.
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I’ve been tired of hearing about this guy for over twenty years now.
He’s always been a douchebag, always spouting controversial things to get a pathetic little thrill.
Judging by this quote, the only thing dying is quality:
Bloody hell, can this guy just shut up? Fucking edgelord.
I know a lot of people love RoR, but I don’t. I have a long list of reasons, including it being slow, the syntax is weird, and while it’s possible to do compile-time type checking, it feels clunky and bolted on. RSpec especially annoys me with its use of dynamic language features to “cheat” when writing tests instead of creating code that is loosely coupled and testable. Don’t get me started on ORMs.
At work, I’m forced to work in legacy RoR codebases, and honestly, AI coming along and letting me work at a layer of abstraction above RoR was a welcome change. I used to spend the a whole day getting pissed off whenever I had to work in these RoR codebases, and letting a LLM generate the code lets me disconnect, keep my emotions out of it’d and pump out whatever drivel is needed to earn my paycheck for the day.
I’ve always chafed with the rails design philosophies.
I’m fine with the idea of a standard set of tools used across projects (if you’re in the ecosystem), but I hate the centralization of thought and implicit magic’s that RoR embraces.
I’m very much an explicit is better than implicit person.
I totally agree. Whenever I've criticised Ruby, e.g. for it's insane level of hard to follow "magic", people just say "that's just Ruby on Rails... not all Ruby is like that". I have no idea why it's popular or why we should listen to anyone that thinks Ruby is amazing and Rust is terrible. It shows an astounding level of poor taste.
Noted crackpot has opinions, film at 11.
I learned Rails to improve my object orientation back in the day. That was the worst mistake I did to my programming career. It basically killed my career. I can only blame myself for not jumping off that train earlier but that framework made me a dumber programmer.
I was excelling and loving the craft until I went head to head with that slop.
Maybe I should make a post about it because you guys are going to get sick of me bitching about it every time his name comes up. But it does make sense why he's head over heals for ai.
Edit: I keep using "since" instead of "sense"... Edit to correct word.
I like hearing complaints about object oriented, i think I'd be interested in that :p
It wasn't really oop that was the problem although it may have provided the plain for the pain as I also didn't like Java much. However, I did appreciate oop in PHP when I went back to it to build a couple sites about 7 or 8 years after bailing from that language.
I'd be interested in that. I'm on a totally different tech stack so I have no RoR experience. But it seems to have influenced a lot of other frameworks
This guy…