Slashdot Mirror
Thinking about Rails? Think Again
wolfeon writes "In 2005, Derek Sivers of CD Baby wanted to scrap his site and perform a rewrite in Rails. He hired Jeremy Kemper, also known as bitsweat on Freenode, to help on the project. Two years later, through blood and sweat, the project was then canceled because of limitations of Rails. Rails just wasn't meant to do everything since it is very much "canned" project. Mr. Sivers has written an entry in the O'Reilly blog: 7 reasons I switched back to PHP."
What a waste of time. Evaluate and use new technology on new tasks.
One of my main customers hired a good team in Vietnam who used PHP, CSS, HTML, and Javascript. I introduced them to Rails a year ago, and they were just about instantly productive.
Deploying Rails can be a small hassle, but there are now lots of good options, including running on JRuby/Goldspike/Java app server.
After twenty five years watching technology try to not suck, one note rings true from The Fine Article. The new girlfriend always seems better... at first. But over time you'll likely discover she too (as one might expect) has foibles, idiosyncrasies that annoy and sometimes downright frustrate.
If you've found a solution to a problem, consider carefully wrapping some other technology around it just because. Unfortunately my experience was that usually new technology/approaches typically were just because, usually driven by management (not always, and I'm not blaming them).
Had I known then what I know now I'd have fought harder for status quo on a lot of big projects.
You dont choose a project for a language, but a language for a project.
Heyho I didn't read the artical but if i've learnt anything (hahah like hell i have), then its planning is key. Plan your project and find a language that works, not the other way around.
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
It is all about choosing the right tool for a job. Sometimes you use a new tool and you wind up feeling like you are trying to put in a screw with a hammer. Sure it will work but not the way you want.
Sometimes you go back to the tool you know how to use best.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
"All the cool kids were using Rails, so I decided if I wanted to be cool, I had to completely switch to Rails in one big jump!"
There's a complete lack of points against Ruby in that article. And I don't say that as a fan, I don't know the langauge at all. It's just got a complete lack of any useful information to judge the usefulness of Ruby.
Reasons:
#1: Seems a very weak criticism, all languages are interchangeable really. Except some do some things much better than others.
#2: Internal management problem, not really related to Ruby specifically.
#3: Applies to every language
#4: Potential for real criticism here, but without any DATA it's completely useless
#5: Works for whatever language the author likes, again not related to Ruby
#6: Potential for more real criticism here, but again lacks any useful information
#7: Again something unrelated to Ruby specifically
From the whole list, only 2 of the reasons point to Ruby in any manner, and those are so uninformative as to be useless anyway. I think most of the blame for this lies with slashdot, as the article tries to spin it into something against Ruby when the actual article is more about a failed migration than anything else.
His only valid complaint was integration.
Why the hell would you take a system written entirely in PHP and add to it / rewrite some of it in a different technology?
I love Rails, and if I have my way I will never touch PHP again. But if I join a company who's intranet is all PHP, then by golly I'm going to use PHP!
This guy is a sensationalist and not worth the attention.
I read the article, and I believe the reasons the author switched back to PHP was because he was more comfortable with it than Ruby. If you read deeper, you'll note that he appreciated the experience in dealing with Ruby, and brought some of it back with him to PHP, but he did not think it was right for his application. Seeing this as a "OMG! Ruby replaced with PHP!" is just another fanboy reading into it what he will.
Time to calm down here, people. Just because one person sees value in another set of tools doesn't mean you will too.
I denno, I ditched Windows for Debian Linux over a year ago and haven't looked back since. (I'm a programmer though, so my needs are a bit different than your typical Windows user)
:-)
Then again, if this article is any indication, maybe I had better wait another year before I speak.
Peace sells, but who's buying?
So, we have a slow language, with ugly syntax. The ugly syntax is subjective, so we'll overlook it for now. We have a slow Smalltalk, but maybe the framework makes up for it. Looking at Ruby on Rails, it seems like a cheap clone of the old NeXT WebObjects (cloned as GNUstepWeb and SOPE, uses Objective-C, which is typically faster than Smalltalk), and so far behind something like Seaside it's not even funny.
So, why do people use Ruby? Or is it like Java, as Guy Steele said:
And you're right: we were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp. Aren't you happy?I am TheRaven on Soylent News
LISP.
Deleted
- the question that scares me most,
- the one that you can never get honest information about from OS or component suppliers,
- and the one that's hardest to test because the most-used features are rarely those you expected.
Who said "prototype the thing, assuming a worst-case scenario"? No can do. With server code, this means you leave out features or spend $$$s more on hardware. And with client code such as AJAX, you know anything could break if used alongside idiot third-party widgets or when another IE patch makes Javascript even slower. You just don't know exactly where it will break in practice. So you add a lot of logging and try to spot when the next bottleneck is approaching. Worst case, it's in obfuscated, third-party modules that you can't change in practice, and you're re-factoring masses of code while angry villagers are breaking down the door. This is IMHO a risk with programming frameworks like Ruby on Rails, or MS dotNet for that matter.Reduce, reuse, cycle
thats because rails is a web FRAMEWORK not a programming language - you know RUBY is underneath it all, right?
people get too tied up with cms's that they think will do everything. code a plugin yourself (assuming a decent api is available).
#include <sig.h>
About your point #6, not only is it easier, but it is easier to add onto later. When you use SQL to create objects, you have to go back to whatever line of code you used to do your insert command and adjust the fields. In Rails, you just run a migration to add a field to the table, then modify your form to add that extra field.
:p
And, I think you're pretty much right on about his other "points." The slashdot summary of his post is entirely misleading and total flamebait--and not written by him. I think the guy is just inexperienced and crawled back to PHP out of a lack of wanting to change his mindset. He does in the end give Rails some credit for introducing him to a logical MVC structure, and I doubt he meant to flame Rails. He just happened to make mostly subjective and uninformed points to justify going back to what he already knew... I'm guessing he named his post "7 reasons..." before actually counting the reasons. Blogging is teh hard
The article reads as a "I tried to use Rails without learning Rails or Ruby and gave up" story and then admits to using many of the Rails patterns in a home grown PHP solution. Well, obviously, if you are much more familiar with another language and refuse to learn the language underneath a framework, it will be hard to use that framework. Point by point:
1. There is nothing that PHP cannot do that Rails cannot do - Well of course, and there's nothing that any language can do that Common Lisp cannot do. Almost all languages implement a Turing machine and can be used to solve any computational problem. The question is code readability, syntactical sugar, and adaptability, all important concepts. Also, the community that has grown around it that builds a knowledge base and plugins and libraries.
2. Their entire company worked on PHP and integration was difficult - Sounds like they didn't understand RPC and services models. Sharing between different languages and platforms is an unfortunate fact of life. Also, it sounds like PHP was the problem here, not Rails, if interoperation was such a problem. "Interoperation" in the article is used oddly - it's actually more about transition to a new site, which has nothing to with the platform used and, if is such a heinous problem, is a problem with design of the new app.
3. Didn't need 90% of Rails - Then why use it? Also, using a tenth of something is not an argument against it if it still the best tool for the job you are doing.
4. The custom solution they jury rigged is "small and fast" - Many Rails apps are small and fast - there's no statistics or analysis here for comparison.
5. The PHP custom app was built for to their tastes - Obviously. If you write a custom app it will miraculously suit your preferences and will probably be a very good solution to your problem. Custom apps if you can do them are often a good idea, keeping in mind the downside is that you don't have a community of knowledge, don't get patches for free, etc..
6. He loves SQL - Fine, don't use ActiveRecord then. Or use ActiveRecord and make direct SQL calls. This goes against common wisdom, of course, regardless of platform, but if you really want to do it, it's there.
7. Programming languages are like girlfriends? - No idea.
The bottom line is that there are criticisms you can level at Rails or any language or framework. However, you actually have to bring facts and analysis to an argument, and this article offers neither.
I have one burning question: What is the take of Jeremy Kemper (aka bitsweat) on this situation? Being "one of the best Rails programmers in the world", many of us would like to hear from him. Has he blogged or posted about this too? (need a link) Does he share the same view points on the situation?
My wife and I ditched Windows for Linux 8 years ago at home. I stopped dual-booting and everything -- no more Windows, period. I still have to use it at work, but my wife didn't for years working in retail. One day, she had to use Windows at work and found it dreadful, I chuckled to myself.
;-)
Funny, 10 years ago I ditched Windows (and OS/2) for Linux at home. I stopped dual-booting and everything -- no more Windows, period. I didn't have to use it at work because I was a college student and while I didn't have a wife, I had numerous girlfriends throughout that time period that had to use it when they were in my apartment or dorm. One day, I got a new computer and it came pre-installed with Windows XP and found it far more impressive than the kludge of shit I had been trying to do w/Linux to fit into a Windows world for the last (at the time) 6 years. I chuckled at myself for trying to hard for so many years when Microsoft actually had a product that worked for once.
Yes, some of us are very happy over the long term using both Linux and Windows. Am I a system administrator? No. Do I program? Yes. Am I the average Joe Computer User? No. Does my wife get a husband that understands the best of both worlds and a network that works happily with whatever flavor we require? Yes.
Just my $0.02, take it or leave it
Hey, if Jeremy Kemper is one of the best, did he raise any warning flags along the way? Do you think he could have curbed the end effect given his high level of expertise?
Given that your O'Reilly Biography describes you as "Still a relative newbie among programmers, he'd appreciate any tips and advice you could give him", why is it you could pull off CDBaby in 2 months in PHP while an expert Rails programmers, including yourself as a second person on the project, could not pull it off on 2 years?
The project doesn't seem that large after all. Had Jeremy worked on comparably large Rails projects before? If so, had he experienced the same problems before. Did he flag them to you?
I'm not trying to lay blame. I have managed projects and seen the good, the bad and ugly and am always interested in getting the full story, from all the people involved, all opinions. Goodness knows I've pulled some doozies in my day that I'm embarrassed about.
I'd also like to hear more details about what exactly was so hard in rails. I reckon that's the most useful information.
If someone else is starting a project and considering rails this information might help them make their decision. San we heard more about what exactly was really hard to do in rails?
Why would you throw out perfectly good code and rewrite everything?
There's nothing wrong with PHP, especially if the current implementation does the job.
Everything you've said is good about Ruby also applies to Smalltalk, which uses blocks (closures) to implement all control structures, has trivial syntax (the entire language can be defined on a single piece of paper, and taught to small children with no programming experience in a few hours). It's obvious that the choice between Ruby and C++ is not necessarily simple; Ruby has higher-level abstractions, C++ has faster execution speed, so the choice depends on which is important. The question is, why would you choose Ruby over any of the following:
- OCaml
- Haskell.
- Common Lisp.
- Smalltalk.
These all have the same high-level abstractions as Ruby (more in some cases). They are all mature languages, and they are all 5-50 times faster in terms of execution speed than Ruby. I understand why you would choose a slow-and-expressive language over a fast-but-less-expressive one, but why would you choose a slow-and-expressive language over a fast-and-expressive one?Even Objective-C can do most of what you claim is great about Ruby, and some other things. For example, I have a category which allows me to send messages to arrays as if they were individual objects and have it perform a map operation in Objective-C, and I've implemented futures in the language, and yet I would still choose Smalltalk over it for anything where speed is not critical.
I would hope, by now, that everyone knows that pretty much any language is better than C++, so 'better than C++' is not much of a recommendation anymore.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
This is his best point.
My VB coding improved immeasurably after I learned C#. And I'm not just talking VB6, I'm talking VB3 as well.
Learning a new language can teach you to do so much better in your old ones. I am *still* more productive, if you want something fast, in VB6 than I am in Java or C#. I can knock together a small cheap GUI very fast.
Of course, sometimes you do run into the limits of your chosen platform. VB6 strings are all 2-byte unicode internally, which makes dealing with UTF-8 a real pain. Then the ugly kludges start coming out.
The point of that particular quote is not that you should write slow code. It is that you should base your optimisations on measurements rather than assumptions -- so you only work on the real bottlenecks, so you know when it's "fast enough", and so you can make informed decisions if a particular optimisation would make the code significantly harder to maintain.
Yes, Ruby (like most scripting languages) lets you drop into C if you really need to... but that's a particularly extreme tradeoff. You should not start out on a Ruby project intending to do this, because it means that future Ruby programmers may not be able to maintain your code. Nor should you pick up Ruby on the basis of pie-in-the-sky promises that there'll be a new interpreter "real soon" that will be "real fast", because the developers might all die in a chain of freak accidents tomorrow. Use Ruby if it makes sense: if it's fast enough today, or if the improvement in programmer productivity is great enough that you can justify solving performance problems with expensive hardware.
Just bear in mind that you're measuring that productivity improvement against other faster scripting languages, like Perl and Python, not against C++. And bear in mind that there are more people with those other languages in their skillset, so they'll be cheaper, easier to find, and easier to replace. And bear in mind that Ruby is currently a fad, so some of the people who love it today are fad-chasers who will leave your company like a shot when the Next Big Thing turns up...
Ruby's the right tool for some jobs, but it's running a grave risk of being a victim of its own success, because when the pro-language hype is way up, so is the anti-language hype whenever anyone gets burned. Maybe you evangelists should cool off a little and prove Ruby's virtue by using it to make yourselves rich, instead of claiming that it's the best thing EVER because it, like, makes it really easy to recurse over directories, just like every other language apart from C++!
Rails did not invent MVC, nor did they invent scaffolding or any of the other stuff. They didn't even make it popular. Very many people get these facts wrong. The only thing Ruby On Rails did as a first was to apply professional marketing strategies when trying to make an open source web application framework popular. They were the first to build a project website that was appealing to the eye more than anything else and they heavyly pushed the concept of the screencast, right when broadband was becoming commonplace. I'm shure almost everybody has watched that famous 'a blog in 15 minutes' screencast. This screencast alone made Rails (and the editor presented in it, Textmate) extremely popular.
Technology wise there are many frameworks and webkits that are far more mature and far more sophisticated than Rails and have been around for 6 years and more.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I've been interested in learning at least one of those languages for a while. Usually what gets in my way is that I can't find the necessary libraries to complete whatever task I'm working on. Can you point me towards the language from your list that has:
* a rich standard library with a good reference
* a good extended library like CPAN
* easy extension in C
* good documentation
* easily available compiler, etc.
I don't mind buying a book, as long as I can get somewhere just from the online documentation. Out of the languages you mention, I got the furthest with OCaml. However, if I needed to do something simple like connect to a database and then contact a directory server using LDAP, I'd be lost.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
...stupid decisions based on myth over reality. You have front end people making decisions about browser security in utter discord with back end choices made for functionality. You have redesign of existing functional systems without starting back at the design specification. You have scale failures because you didn't test your nonexistent spec. for scale.
I'm glad I don't work there.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Linux also represents something significant. Essentially it has come to represent a set of software that does things in a standard way that multiple businesses can implement and compete in a compatible way. This is the key thing that pushed the PC architecture, competition. You can choose Ubuntu, Red Hat(Fedore/CentOS), SuSE, Debian, Mandriva, Gentoo, or any number of others, and still run the same software. You can pull one together yourself if so inclined, or use a community maintained one, and/or have commercial support. MS rode the PC platform to success because they were the only software company to support it on arbitrary hardware vendors. So powerful was this advantage that the industry essentially gave them the monopoly before any other company had a serious offering to consider under the same terms (They had it pretty well gotten by Windows 3.0). Now Linux can represent the same phenomenon, but for the operating system. In order to overcome MS, it's had to be truly Free, but there remains a healthy commercial environment around it.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The original Slashdot post implies some things that are not substantiated by the actual content of the article (blog post). It sure seems as though the poster him/herself has something against Rails.
The actual blog post (and poster) imply that Rails was not designed to do things that they were trying to do. That may or may not be... but that is not the fault of Rails. If the tool was inappropriate for the project, then the project manager should have determined that before starting.
Also, while it is implied (and even stated) that Rails was not designed to do these things... nowhere is he specific about what those things actually are. Rather than berating Rails, the blog post glorifies PHP. Those are two very different things.
In introductory Business Law at my college, there was discussion of the classic case of the tavern visitor in the 1700s who stated "My horse can pisse better beer than this!" (sic) The tavern owner sued the patron for slander. (In those days most taverns made their own beer.)
The judge ruled that the statement was not slander, because the customer did not insult the tavern owner's beer at all... rather, he had complimented his horse!
There really is a big difference. So... I want to know what he does not like about Rails, since he really did not explain that.
On a practical level rather than a "my code is more beautiful than yours" level, one answer is simple: deployment. If you're writing a program that's intended to be used pretty much just by you (or other people on your dev team, perhaps), it really doesn't matter what you write it in. If you're writing a program that's going to have to be rolled out to production systems that you don't have absolute control over -- like, say, a commercial web-hosting service -- there are new issues.
Ruby is getting a lot of attention because of Rails, and Rails' attention is making it moderately easy to find web hosts that support it. It is easier to deploy a Rails application than it is to deploy a Django application, if you're taking into account "I must find a web host that supports my framework/language." If you are writing, a web app in Smalltalk using Seaside, well, not only are you definitely not shoving that out to your $8/month Dreamhost account, the chances are you're going to have to have complete control of the production side (i.e., colocation or self-hosting). Also, of course, if you're writing for a business, maintainability becomes an issue with any "obscure" language: eventually, the original development team won't be there, and if you can't replace them because the dozen other people in your area who know the language you chose are happy at the research labs they're working at, you find yourself in a very uncomfortable place. I've heard the even a kindergartner can learn Smalltalk so fast they'll be writing complete CRM systems in a week! speech, too, but in practice it seems those kindergartners are few and far between.
Frankly, deployment issues are one of the reasons I'm slinking back to PHP myself; as much as I love Rails in theory, as it turns out, in practice Rails is a sufficient resource pig that many shared hosts that claim to support Rails put serious limitations on it unless you bump up your service level. (I know I'm inviting arguments from Rails fans here, but yes, I've really looked into this.)
On of the comments on the existing site contains this additional information:
...The deal was this: Derek was not a programmer; he was a musician.
> I'm a little reluctant to add to the wasteland that is this post
> and these comments, but here goes.
>
> He learned some PHP and cobbled together the old CDBaby site by himself.
> It was good.
> Then, he heard about Rails, and became infatuated with it. He proceeded
> to attempt a rolling rewrite of CDBaby's frontend and backend both
> (the backend is large, because of inter-label and digital distribution
> stuff) in Rails.
> At this time, Derek had no experience with the following things:
>
> * any language other than PHP
> * systems integration and interoperability
> * Rails
> * object-orientation
> * the MVC pattern
> * managing a development team
Concluding with:
> No framework saves you from your own inexperience.
>I understand why you would choose a slow-and-expressive language over a fast-but-less-expressive one, but why would you choose a slow-and-expressive language over a fast-and-expressive one?
Library, Library, Library, Library.
Then comes community, documentation, availability of tools.
Let me ask you a question.
Smalltalk has been around for ages. If it's so great then how come it never caught on?
evil is as evil does
Looking at Ruby on Rails, it seems like a cheap clone of the old NeXT WebObjects
It has been a long time since I did WebObjects work, but I don't think they're particularly similar. The spirit is certainly very different.
So, why do people use Ruby?
I think there are two big crowds. One is the smart OO guys who have been suffering through Java for years. Smalltalk is not commercially viable, but Ruby is. Suddenly, they can escape all the Java idiocy. For the ones doing web stuff, and in particular the ones who have dealt with the absurdity of trying to program via large XML framework config files, Rails is a similarly big relief.
The other crowd comes from PHP and other low-rent web development. Ruby + Rails lets them get something up as quickly as in PHP, but provides them better long-term tools and something much closer to what I'd call object-oriented development. Of course, a lot of those people quickly get in over their heads in Rails, as a lot of the shoddier Rails plugins demonstrate.
So maybe it would be better if Rails were written in Smalltalk or Lisp. But Ruby it is, and it's not so bad. If Java's half-way between C++ and Lisp, then Ruby's cut the distance in half again.
I've now written two large business applications in Rails. I did the UML modelling first. Then I wrote a fully constrained RDBMS schema, normalised to 3NF, using the Rails naming conventions. Then I wrote the Rails app on top of the rigorously constrained database.
If you want multi-key uniqueness constraints, just define it in your database already! Why do you think Rails prevents you from configuring your database layer?
When I need to do transactions, I use Rails' full support for transactions. There, that wasn't so difficult, was it?
I let Rails save me hours of backbreaking labour writing conventional SQL queries. Then I use the completed application, identify the query bottlenecks (thanks to Rails' built-in profiling) and re-write the slowest of the dumb auto-created SQL using hand-written SQL, which I can get to using find_by_sql, finder_sql, etc. Rails lets you put your own SQL into the application almost anywhere.
Does my bum look big in this?
Referential integrity and unique constraints should always be enforced by the database. Why even have a database if you're not going to use it?
Perhaps I'm missing something in your post, because it sounds to me like you're advocating every application that accesses the database to enforce data integrity rules. This is a recipe for data corruption, as I'm sure you already know.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock