Two Weeks with RoR
Listening to: New Day Come - Shapeshifter
I have spent the last two weeks implementing an app in Ruby on Rails. I have to say that I am very seriously impressed.
I don’t particularly miss writing stored procs and I sure don’t miss having to write data-layer code. I like the relative simplicity of the stack and I love the general consistency of just about every thing (though a couple of Ruby issues tripped me up early on). Partial templates are super powerful, especially once you throw AJAX into the mix. I have all the tools I’m used to such as breakpoints etc and I am yet to reach an “aw crap! can’t do that!” moment.
The single most impressive thing has been how productive I have been… kinda to the point of leaving me a little more slack jawed than usual. The single biggest brake on my progress is finding out HOW to do stuff. The core documentation is very good, but I have found that I rapidly got into stuff that wasn’t as clearly documented which, when combined with my lack of knowledge with the language, made me feel a little like the way I feel on the dance floor - two left feet and got no rhythm. A typical day is hours of research and minutes of coding. But that’ll teach me to tackle a whole new platform and a whole new language.
Syntactically, Ruby is a pretty language with some great features for dealing with collections and specifying ranges. I don’t miss my curly braces and semicolons at all.
The experience to date has provided a lot food for thought about executing business ideas and the cult of complexity… But over all it has left me very excited about software again.
