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.
Átila on Code 