Monthly Archives: March 2016

2016/03/15
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Programming

MVC is really lots of mutable state?

I’ve been doing the Rails tutorial recently. Quickly at first and now a bit slower. The book is really well done, but my interest in implementing a Twitter clone is waning, so I’m just trying to do a little bit every day.

I like all the testability available in Rails. It’s saved me from many mistakes I’ve made while writing the code in the book, which is great. That’s the point of tests.

Ruby is a cool little language. I suspect I like it more than Python, but I just haven’t used Ruby enough to see its warts. Once I do I’ll be able to have an educated opinion.

What I’m really disliking so far though is the amount of mutable state that seems to be needed to get anything done in this framework. The Controller part of MVC doesn’t really control so much as it sets instance variables to be picked up by embedded Ruby code in the HTML view template. That makes me feel… dirty. One of my own quotes is “Mutable state is the root of evil”, so there’s that.

The other thing that’s slightly bugging me about Rails right now is the amount of magic that happens behind the scenes. I love me some automagic: I’m a metaprogramming enthusiast because I like my code to write my code for me. But… I’m more comfortable when knowing how the magic works and what problems it’s solving. Right now, naming things correctly just seem to connect things to each other, it all works, but I have no idea how or why.

Still, it’s an impressive framework. “rails generate” is awesome. And the number of things web developers need to juggle at the same time is impressive.

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2016/03/07
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Programming

Web Dev

I’ve pretty much always been a systems programmer. These days most of what I see on programming blogs and the like are related to web development somehow, and it makes sense. From mobile to actual websites, this is how most things are shipped. People buying software to run on their desktop computers is, like, so 20th century.

I figured this was a gaping hole in my CV so I’ve been meaning to dip my toes in for quite a while now. I unexpectedly “sorta kinda” finished all the personal projects I wanted to work on and found myself girlfriend-less for the weekend and now I’ve gone through half the chapters of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial book. It’s really well written, I recommend it. I’ve been fascinated by the journey.

There are a lot of moving parts in web development, it turns out. Even though I haven’t written a website from scratch, the sheer number of directories and hints the books drops about the work Rails does for you is amazing. I know what goes into talking to a database – it’s incredible how easy it all is.

As soon as I’m done with the tutorial, I just need to think up a cool personal project that a website would be appropriate for. Also, I might finally write enough Ruby code to be able to make an informed comparison with Python. I think I like Ruby better, but I just haven’t written enough code in it yet.

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