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.
I keep reading RoR as “Risk of Rain” and I have to admit that I’d be far more interested if their developers said something than if DHH did. DHH is pretty much just a wannabe Elon Musk, and nothing he says is worth the bytes of storage it takes to hold them.
This guy…
Judging by this quote, the only thing dying is quality:
Since the beginning of the year, the quality of software has been degrading pretty much everywhere, much of it caused by over-reliance on AI, or perhaps more accurately, the outsourcing of thinking and decision making to AI. In July, I moved my video podcast off of Spotify after a series of unexplainable outages, and Spotify’s engineering team seemed to take no real pride or accountability in fixing the root causes of the issue.
Only this week, Uber shipped a new feature to production in the Uber Eats app – a new way to select extras with your food order – with seemingly no QA testing:
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 since why he’s head over heals for ai.
I’m interested. Did you disagree with their opinionated style or something else? My first software job used RoR but I didn’t end up trapped by it, but I can confidently say I do not like Ruby
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
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 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.
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.
