Slashdot Mirror
The Rails Girls Are Coming to a City Near You (Video)
So far, the Rails Girls have groups in cities ranging from Warsaw to Wellington, with U.S. gatherings in Washington D.C., Charlotte NC, San Francisco CA, and... let's make it easy: Here's a map. OMG! They're everywhere! Actually, mostly Europe, being as they started in Finland, same as the Leningrad Cowboys and a popular computer operating system. But they're spreading like mad. Would you believe the reason one of the two founders originally got interested in Ruby on Rails was because she wanted to make a fan page for American politician Al Gore? Our interviewee, Magda (from Rails Girls Warsaw), swears this is true. She also tells us about their upcoming Washington D.C. workshop on June 13th, 2013, in conjunction with the June 14-15 RubyNation event. Sounds like fun, doesn't it. Maybe you need more of this kind of fun where you live, eh? If there isn't a Rails Girls group near you, maybe you should start one and help more women and girls get into programming. This is the Rails Girls' goal. Any particular ages? Not really. And their workshops are all free of charge: "You just need to be excited!"
Sure about that? Hope you're a fan of neckbeards...
There really isn't any other reason to get excited about RoR.
I thought that fad was dead?
Required reading for internet skeptics
Flame war incoming.
The guy who invented Ruby wanted the language to be "humane". Apparently, he succeeded.
Totally not a paid advertisement...
For the love of god, stop snorting so much cocaine before writing a summary. Have some restraint and wait until afterwards.
Its great getting women into programming... but seriously, ruby on rails is shit.
Is this the thread where fat bearded forever alone guys make fun of girls doing stuff they do without needing their help or approval?
Journaists get a lot of flack, but at least they know how to construct a story. /. contributors on the other hand...
Take the summary - not so much a summary as a prattling mess, that doesn't define its subject and so leaves the reader with no idea what on earth the text means.
The Return of the Prrrl Riot
Sounds like a front for guys to meet girls.
It was fun while it lasted.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
I've had more people getting me out of programming than into programming. It was C.
Remember boys, no Dongles allowed at Rails Girls, and certainly no forking. Stick with Django if you're interested in forking dongles.
Can you imagine if I set up a 'Rails Whites' group or a 'Rails African Americans' group? This is no different.
Not exactly moving from strength to strength, there.... Unless "nicheiest fandom possible" is considered a strength.
Teaching women/girls to use Ruby on Rails isn't so much sexist as downright misogynist and abusive...
Rails is shit anyways.
grammar sucks too
It's so easy even a girl can do it!
I know for a fact that some girls can even do it right, by deleting Ruby in it's entirety.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
something tells me is just going to be a bunch of dudes... Ironic that the rails girls video included a bunch of dudes.. My guess is they can't actually get any participation from women because women are not into ruby on rails.
I thought:
"I bet the first comment on this article is going to be obnoxious and misogynist"
I was right!
Ze Atomic Device! It iz Ztolen!
What lost me was when I clicked on the link and the page was covered in pencil doodles of kitties and ponies and crap. If you are trying to make it with a fricking band at least TRY to look somewhat professional, that thing looks like it was made by a 16 year old Twitard to declare whether they are with team shirtless or team shovelface...ugh.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I can understand the desire by many to attract more women into the CS/software dev field. I'm just not sure if the right way to do it is to emphasize one-gender-only programs. It seems to erode the basis of one of the more public goals; that women in the CS field be treated as equals with males in the CS field(*), while admittedly fulfilling other goals.
We already know how 'separate but equal' turns out.
I note above there's already a misogynistic note - even though it's just a joke - that some people are only interested if they're naked, so maybe there's a point anyway, at least in the short term.
to get to the bottom line: "help more women and girls get into programming"
Django Girls can do it with only two fingers.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
"You just need to be excited!"
That's going to be a problem.
Maybe (except for these girls) the female programmers know better than to waste their time with RoR, and instead concentrate on serious languages and platforms like C, C++, Java, Javascript, and even Python and PHP.
RoR is indeed shit, but SAAS was ok.
I got around that problem by using SAAS in Django. The best of both worlds.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Python and PHP are the same shit as Ruby, different syntax.
Real Wymyn write Apache modules in C.
We all know how it would work out if someone did something similar to this for men instead.
As you say, separate but equal isnt the way to go here.
I dont agree with this groupthink that somehow women choosing to go into other fields is somehow a horrible phenomenon that "WE" somehow are obligated to remedy. That's bullshit. Most women dont want to be programmers. The ones that do, are not in any way prohibited or locked out of all the same resources the guys use.
So what's the message this group and others like it are putting out? Are they trying to tell us that women arent good enough? They have to have all this special gender-specific help or they will fail? They just arent smart enough? Is that really what they are trying to say?
Cause I think that's bullshit too. Plenty of women I know with plenty of brains. Most of them dont go into programming for perfectly rational reasons - there is something else that interests them more.
If something else interests you more, you should go do that instead. Man or woman, doesnt matter.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I went to the first one in Wellington (New Zealand) this last weekend, and had an awesome time. Highly recommended to other ladies! If nothing else, it showed a number of people that ladies can have an effect on how things are built (and what), and that dev was doable, could be fun and interesting, and might even be a career path. A very positive outcome.
And people - if you're going to say [coding language x] is shit, you should say _why_ :)
Python and PHP are the same shit as Ruby, different syntax.
We're actually not talking about Ruby proper here, but Ruby on Rails.
Anyway, Python and PHP both have far more support and popularity than Ruby. Getting a web host account that has PHP support is trivial (in fact, it'd be a real feat to get an account that doesn't support PHP these days), and Python is almost as trivial. Ruby, however, isn't that common.
...all I hear is "ear ear ear ear ear". Stop pronouncing the "r" so much at the ends of words!
Rails sucks except for mass-production crank-em-out-cheap "web sweat shops" with a carefully-selected staff.
It's too different from "regular" programming for places with fungible and/or multi-hat staff such that the learning curve is too large. It's the right tool for the right place, but that RIGHT place is not everywhere.
Use the right tool for the job and know your staffing patterns. There is NO one-magic-size-fits-all. It does quite well where it fits well, but the trade-off is that it sucks badly outside of its comfort zone.
i've never used it, but the name sounds shit enough
but then again a lot of things that are even remotely connected with linux have some weird names
it shows that women are attracted to shiny things rather than cool things
now now don't be so sexist... women loved brushed stainless steel fridges, which are cool in more ways than one :)
real women cook steak for men who program by cutting down trees, chewing them up into pulp to make their own paper and punching holes for other real women to validate and run as programs
Python
any language where indentation is part of the syntax is gay
HEY! You need to calm down with that! They are professional in an indie-hip-I'm_way_cooler_than_you-progressive-warmfuzzy way that you just wouldn't understand!
Seriously, though...I'm completely with you. As a nerd I can appreciate a progressive work environment that is more comfortable and less corporate chic/stuffy but we are going way too far these days. Kittens and ponies...you might as well tell girls that are seriously interested in web development "Get into rails development so you can make shitty pages like we all used to when we were 15!" If you're supposed to appeal to women and show them that they can do it too, at least try to make it somewhat professional so it will appeal to adults instead of children. It doesn't need to be corporate, just not ponies and kittens...holy hell.
Hey, I didn't say it was a big favorite of mine, just that it's widely used and accepted.
Most of the PHP MVC frameworks are direct rip-offs of Rails, but whatever ... enjoy your shared hosting accounts.
What's wrong with a shared hosting account for a low-traffic site?
What exactly is better about Django? Django's template library and ORM are objectively terrible and Django is even slower than Rails. It's unfortunate because Jinja 2 and SqlAlchemy are significantly better than anything available in Ruby.
Ponies? Now I'm confused - is this about Rails or Django?
What an unfortunate nickname...
Why is it unfortunate? Are you stuck with Django?
There are plenty of other frameworks that let you use jinja2 and SQLA together if that's what you want.
No, that's grammatically correct. Ruby on Rails is what Rails is an abbreviation of, and as such "is" is the correct verb for the sentence.
Pro tip: Just because it ends in s, does not mean that it's plural.
Came here for this comment. Very satisfied. Thank you.
Not going to leave satisfied quite yet until I choose to open my yap.
So, what has the Ada Initiative accomplished with their sexism and presumption that all men are rapists?
1. We now have a new joke every time there's an article about women in IT.
2. ???
How many more girls are going to pick up, well, in this case, Ruby on Rails and go "hey, that's neat!" and learn programming because the Ada Initiative handed out creeper cards, censored panels, and cost individuals their jobs?
0
The really sad part to all this the more I think about it is how it even had my misogyny going for a while. I was raised as a male during the 90s. Reverse discrimination across the board. I know what it's like to be unfairly treated in very overt ways simply because of a body part I never even wanted. Hell, that body part was even mutilated at birth and never properly healed, leaving me with the exquisite experience of knowing the kind of genital pain that's only supposed to be associated with FGM.
The trouble is that one of these days I'm going to be a woman looking for a job (mostly because undergoing gender transition in a nearly all conservative womyn-born-womyn environment just isn't going to work).
Is this what I get to thank the Ada Initiative for? Thanks, Ada Initiative. I'm really looking forward to being perceived as somebody who's going to be a total bitch who's going to sue for sexual harassment at the first dongle joke. Thanks, Ada Initiative. Sure, the Ada Initiative may not consider me a woman because I'm not a "womyn-born-womyn," but people who gender me female perceive me no differently than any other woman. Mostly because unlike in Crocodile Dundee, folks don't actually go checking genitals in real life.
Thanks, Ada Initiative. You sure did a favor for women.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
Low traffic sites don't need to be built with frameworks.
Django is better because I like it more than RoR. Probably because Python is pretty good and I use it enough to be fluent. I don't care about speed, it's fast enough for my purposes. I've written high performance web stuff and it didn't involve 'frameworks' or SQL databases.
But Django's support for style inheritance is notable by its complete absence. Hence my comment.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
So what is the web framework du jour? I'm not going to try them all.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
This has to be the most sexist technology thing I've ever seen. Seriously, Ruby on Rails for girls?
Well, girls do love precious stones, so I guess it makes a certain amount of sense... :-P
I just think it's funny that you call Rails shit when you prefer a big bloated Python framework that is worse in almost every conceivable way.
Yet RoR is a notoriously poor choice for high-traffic sites.
I think Grishnakh is on to something here...
Required reading for internet skeptics
Misogyny is all the rage in tech, gaming, and rationalist communities. I have no idea why, but I wish they'd tone it down.
Required reading for internet skeptics
NYC here, feeling slighted not to have been included on the US tour.
The full quote of the origin of your sig... It seems to have a different tone when you read the full context...
Western civilization, it seems to me, stands by two great heritages. One is the scientific spirit of adventure – the adventure into the unknown, an unknown which must be recognized as being unknown in order to be explored; the demand that the unanswerable mysteries of the universe remain unanswered; the attitude that all is uncertain; to summarize it – the humility of the intellect. The other great heritage is Christian ethics – the basis of action on love, the brotherhood of all men, the value of the individual – the humility of the spirit.
These two heritages are logically, thoroughly consistent. But logic is not all; one needs one's heart to follow an idea. If people are going back to religion, what are they going back to? Is the modern church a place to give comfort to a man who doubts Godmore, one who disbelieves in God? Is the modern church a place to give comfort and encouragement to the value of such doubts? So far, have we not drawn strength and comfort to maintain the one or the other of these consistent heritages in a way which attacks the values of the other? Is this unavoidable? How can we draw inspiration to support these two pillars of western civilization so that they may stand together in full vigor, mutually unafraid? Is this not the central problem of our time?
Shiat, it's considered torture for either sex. We need to get Geneva involved.
Ruby was a great idea could have been its "improve performance later" motto. Hows that going, now nearly 20 years later? Idiots.
Maybe after you become a woman you'll realise why we need organisations like the Ada Initiative.
Do you have any sources for the transphobia you're citing?
You are trying to sell your band to the world and get taken seriously as female musicians...so you make your site look like a 15 year old twitard chick's fanfic page? Really?
I've played with many a female musician (no pun intended) and they would frankly be insulted by this shit, their site just screams "I'm a girly girl with titties but no brains, giggle giggle" that it really does a disservice to female musicians because all it does is reinforce that stereotype.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
If popularity is very important to you then you'll probably want to stick with Django or Rails.
Personally I'm partial to Pyramid (the merger of Pylons and BFG). It seems more 'engineered' than the very opinionated frameworks like Rails and Django or the steady stream of new 'simple' frameworks. It is completely agnostic when it comes to templating libraries or data persistence layers.
That does mean that you need to make more choices and architectural decisions yourself, and there is a longer learning curve figuring out the best options etc. But that pays off later when your apps get more complex and you won't have to fight the against the framework.
I suggest it as it's likely that someone who prefers SQLAlchemy over the simpler ORMs in Rails or Django though is likely to be someone who appreciates more powerful non opinionated frameworks.
Rails is shit anyways.
grammar sucks too
Despite what DC Comics might think, you do not pluralize a proper noun that is homonymous with a non-proper noun by changing its form in the same manner as the non-proper form of the noun.
"Reign of the Supermen!" should have been "Reign of the Supermans".
"Rails is shit" is both correct and true.
Virtual servers are dirt cheap now, and what kind of slashdotter doesn't want root?
That was comment inheritance. The parent comment assign RoR - shit. My comment inherited that assignment and added the Django+Style Inhertance - I like property.
Your comment overrode that assignment, but if you were using python you could assign a tuple django - {i like, bloated}
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
They are? Where? And for less than $4/month please.
Finally some girlz— naked and covered with hot grits— for the rails brogrammers to enjoy!
Digital Ocean for $5/month, if you can stretch your budget.
And yet I think we aren't selling programming enough to teenagers.
But... the future refused to change.
Definitely need to tone it down. With a nice cup of coffee. At 3am, and not in an elevator.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Rails Girls?
Everybody got it but me.
Peter, Paul, George and Harry.
Everybody has a new car.
Everybody got it but me.
Everybody sleeps with Mary,
Peter, Paul, George and Harry.
But who would ever have suspected
that that sweet young girl was infected?
Now everybody got it but me.
Rails Girls? The mind boggles.
I've been pretty happy with my 256 MB VPS from FrontRangeHosting for $4/mo before a 50% off coupon code. They also have a 128 MB one for $2/mo. The 50% off coupon has expired, but there is a 25% off code that appears to still work: "FRH25".
You can't spell "oneiromancy" without "roman".
If women are so smart then why are they using rails?
Low-traffic sites are the equivalent of self-publishing. Which is to say pointless, and largely driven by vanity.
Global Interpreter Lock. Ruby is just a toy and cannot even hope to scale the performance peaks that a well-honed Java solution can.
Yes, it's pretty slow; yes, there are limits. If you need more, then you need to pay a little more. Compared to the situation 5 years ago, costs are way, way down.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
You're an idiot. Countless small businesses have low-traffic sites, and don't need anything more, since they're small businesses. It's not vanity for the local pizza shop to have its own website that you can order a pizza on, and something like that has no need for a dedicated server when they might get a handful of hits per hour at best.
Indeed. Like they had problems reading the standard documentation or something.
I just realized that the quote at the bottom of the page was:
"It might help if we ran the MBA's out of Washington." -- Admiral Grace Hopper
It let me wondering if she would have joined such a club...
My main gripe with it is that web apps written using Rails don't scale very well from an architectural/maintainable point of view.
Interesting (sincerely); I read this from time to time, but don't hear much about why people believe it (note: I'm RoR ignorant).
Question: at what point(s) does RoR start to not scale very well?
Long-tail reasoning would suggest the most web apps are pretty small and will never grow to operate at ebay or facebook scale; seems to be plenty of room for easy-to-build smaller apps that never need to scale.
But my belief is that is because of the encouragement to work within the framework and take a "pragmatic" approach makes developers unwilling (and sometimes unable) to design a better program. It isn't an inherent problem with the language.
(emphasis added)
So... if the language (Ruby) is fine, and the framework (Rails) doesn't scale, is that actually a problem?
My first thought is easily reaching the scale-point (where you need to start building from scratch, or maybe with a somehow stronger framework) to "grow to the next level" doesn't seem that bad.
(Not that you were making a value judgement about scaling being a problem; I just read you as stating an observation; a useful thing to know.)
If a man had written TFA the response would've been at the same level. It's rather annoying to hear an exalted highschool "person" cheerleading a programming language in the way, as if it's some fashion accessory that needs to be demoed in the streets at full tilt.
Methinks some people are just too willing to be offended.
Comments in this thread are - just - plain - sad.
For years, people in the IT world have bemoaned the fact that there aren't enough women in IT, /. people who can
YET, when a bunch of women do something about it, the only thing most of
be bothered to comment say are derogatory - either about the women or about the project overall.
WHO gives a flying rat's rear end if there are sweet looking pictures on the front page? This simply
attracts the younger generation. (Young girls are - like young boys - less intimidated by something
that appears friendly and that they relate to.) I can imagine a lot of 11-15 yo finding this appealing.
(Maybe some will be even younger, who knows?) They've also sprinkled their pages with funny
cartoons to keep them reading!
WHY in the nederworld does it matter if the programming paradigm isn't everyone's favourite?
Getting young women into the field is the desired outcome. They'll figure out for themselves
that there are other things in this area. They just need a way to get started. (And for those
retractors, yes, there will be a number of women who don't want or need this type of support.)
Like it or not, getting a foot into the door with whatever programming language that is *easy*
(how many of you started with basic? HUH?) keeps the interest level up. As the person
learns, they move onto more complex structures.
Really, for those who've posted these - you ought to hang your heads in shame. I bet a lot of ...
you didn't even look past the home page
Do you have a bleeding vagina?
Early in my career, the first Windows programmer I worked with was female. She pwned me in terms of skillset. It was a valuable lesson.
"The wisdom of the Patriarchs was that they *knew* they were fools." --Master Foo
I've never understood why there's so much support to such a sexist group. I'm sure if I made a group "Python for men", or "Python for whites" I'd end up in jail (or maybe just really beaten up).
But "Ruby for girls", which focuses on helping women (without any rational reason for it's sexism), is all so popular.
Are you stuck with rails?
There are other frameworks and you can easily take out what you like from Rails and use it with whatever. The modularity of Ruby + Rack complaint apps and libs = win over Python