What the hell is happening to rails?

What's happening to Rails? DHH is adding some new APIs, and he's suggesting new programming guidelines and conventions.<p>This is nothing new. He's been doing this every 6 to 12 months since Rails 0.13 (at least). Here are some of the bigger disruptions:<p>- Rails 1.2: Rewrite all your controllers to use the new REST model. (This was annoying, but the results looked a lot better.)<p>- Rails 2.0: Change from ";" to "/" in standard resource routes, and rewrite controllers to use respond_to.<p>- Rails 3.0: Deal with bundler, ActiveModel, Arel, a total overhaul of ActionMailer, etc., etc.<p>By historical standards, the asset pipeline is a medium-sized change, and certainly much smaller than the Rails 3.0 changes. And unlike the Rails 3.0 changes, you can turn it off in about 2 minutes.<p>Personally, I rather liked most of these new features at the time: They addressed my day-to-day pain, they made my code cleaner, and they helped me keep in sync with other programmers. Rails is optimized for a certain set of opinions, which overlap about 80% with my own, and that's usually good enough for me. If your tastes diverge from DHH's tastes to a greater extent, it won't be as much fun.

I spent the end of last year doing Java/Struts. Felt like time travelling back to 2002. Back when I knew PHP, versions increased, but nothing really changed for years and years (I'd be surprised if it was much different today). The .NET folk will tell you how great ASP.NET MVC is, but they live in their own world - a new view engine doesn't close the gap which exists between it and more progressive MVC frameworks.<p>The point? If you want stagnant frameworks there's plenty to pick. A lot of them aren't easier to learn, but none of them require you to keep learning. This is great because it tends to attract all the programmers you want to avoid into obvious communities.

<i>If you want to learn rails, don’t get the latest pragmatic programmers book. Go and get the 1st or 2nd edition. Get an old copy of rails and ignore all this.</i><p>Worst. Advice. Ever.<p><i>Once you’ve figured that all out then upgrade and expect to spend the same amount of time learning all the new stuff. You don’t save any time jumping to Rails 3+.</i><p>This just isn't true.

I think the big difference between now and when Rails was first starting to gain popularity is that now most of the blogs are primarily covering advanced/obscure topics related to rails. Years ago, most blog posts were about the basics of getting started with rails. Now those old posts no longer apply to the newer version of rails. This is not the fault of rails and it is not the fault of bloggers. There is no shortage of books available to learn rails, but learning a new framework via books is not always the most approachable way for newcomers to learn rails. It would be awesome if someone rebooted some of the older railscasts by Ryan Bates Railscasts for rails 3.1, but that takes a lot of effort and in another year or two the content will again become stale. I would love to see some people blog about the basics of using new versions of rails.<p>Rails has been improving over the years, and I think excellent design decisions have been made. I do not think it is the fault of rails that the author feels that rails is less approachable.

This sounds like an old person ranting about the good ol' days when it's probably a personal phobia against change.<p>I started learning rails just as 3 was coming out. I had made a site with rails 2 and while googling around for help I found all these tutorials about rails 3 and they definitely made everything much easier. Sure, if I had more time invested in 2 (like this guy?) I'd be peeved, but I'm luckily more aligned with the direction of rails rather than its past.

This seems to be a complaint that Rails is a moving target, and that the target is being moved in absence of a genuine need.<p>------------------------<p>I think this is more my problem with the whole thing. The coffeescript thing just bugs me for some reason, it seems a bit like the javascript helper, rjs days and look how those panned out.<p>There's a Joel Spolsky article making fun of the way .NET releases come thick and fast just to keep Microsoft developers constantly worrying about catching up ... I just have this weird feeling that we're becoming the punchline in that joke.

Catalyst is the main web framework for Perl, and it's always been of this design. No opinions, craft every little component exactly to your own specifications. No default ORM, no default Javascript helpers, no default form builder, no default templating library. Bring Your Own (or download from CPAN).<p>Back in the day, I remember writing reddit comments and blog posts to explain the relative popularity of Rails over Catalyst. It was usually along the lines of, "people want to be told what to do. given a screw, they would rather bash it in with a hammer than to read about what a screwdriver is." Posts like this reinforce that point: people don't use Rails because they want to use Rails, people use it because they're afraid of anything else. Rails gave them everything that they thought they needed, and no easy way to back out of the defaults. It was a comfortable world where you could never do something wrong. Now that Rails is becoming a meta-framework like Catalyst, people are being driven away because they have to think before they program, and they have to customize Rails into the framework <i>they</i> want instead of just using the framework that dhh wants.<p>You can even see this in the Perl community; people are switching away from Catalyst in favor of mini-frameworks that barely meet their needs, just because they feel like the framework author has thought of everything and they will never write a line of boring code again.<p>If only.

The problem with Rails is not the pace of change so much as the wild changes of direction it takes, sometimes introducing serious performance degradations into official releases. Sometimes it's hard to see a guiding core philosophy other than the fact they want to be on the shiny edge. It's nice that they aren't stuck with bad design decisions forever but when you go in for an upgrade and you depend on some unpopular plugins, you can bet on pain and even performance problems.<p>A major issue with some parts of the community is that some programmers think that being rubyists automatically makes them elegant programmers even if they don't have a clue about proper algorithms and that's probably why others call them "hipsters". The general disregard for improving performance, inherited from Ruby, is also something endemic from a while back. Sure programmer time is important but how many successful companies have started with Rails only to end up with a patchwork of Java, Scala, C++, etc. after lots of downtime and growing pains.<p>Getting your app into production is also another pain point with the all the dirty tricks you need to master, not to mention an array of lackluster choices be it nginx, passenger, unicorn, rvm, REE, bundler, etc.<p>So with that background, I think the author's gripes are understandable but it really doesn't touch on the undercurrent of discontent surrounding the current ecosystem.

I've been building a new app with the Rails 3.1 rcs for the last 3 or 4 weeks. I still have no idea how to actually deploy into production in a way that has a chance of working.<p>As far as I can tell, I need the V8 code built on my production boxes! That seems insane, unless I want to switch to using node.js....<p>On my FreeBSD system, I still have no idea how to get V8 built correctly. I've bailed on it for now and am running my 'production' server with the 'development' environment.<p>Remember, I'm not running beta software, I'm running a 'release candidate'.<p>When this works, it'll probably be great, but stick with 3.0 if you actually want to make progress on your application.

I've been coding in Rails since pre-1.0, and while some decisions have annoyed me, I am ultimately happy with the direction Rails has gone. It keeps Rails at the forefront of web technology.

What is happening is that the language/framework continues to grow/mature/(get older). Not sure if that is a good thing. My guess is that as more Use Cases are being implemented a lot of the early simplicity is being lost. As it gets older it starts to accumulate good stuff and bad stuff. Just like any other language. I think most languages go through this.<p>&#60;satire&#62; My guess is that eventually there will be another golden boy and a whole new generation of programmers will swear that it is the best thing since the invention of the wheel while at the same time complaining of all the baggage and bad decisions made in Ruby/Rails and ridiculing anybody that still uses it. Meanwhile the Ruby/Rails developers will look and scratch their heads wondering what all the hate is about. After all, Ruby/Rails gets the job done even if it is not perfect and anybody that is a language fanboy does not have a brain. After all, a programming language is just a tool. A whole generation latter the cycle repeats itself with yet another golden boy language. Sigh! To be young and stupid. Those were the days. &#60;/satire&#62;

I don't get it. I found rails 3 exceptionally easy to learn. Sass is a dream. It's what css should have been. Haml has its annoyances but in general is great. Both of these are also exceptionally easy to learn. I love where rails is going.

I stay caught up on everything in railsland just by watching Railscasts. I can't deny that it's chaotic right now but I'm enjoying the rapid progress. I like the little things, like js and css moving from public to app.<p>Also, I think the switch from prototype to jQuery will help beginners.

I could never wrap my head around the Rails world. I enjoy the elegance and simplicity of Python/Django. There's a lot less 'holy shit magic' moments.

The problem is not that rails has gotten too difficult to pick up (although, I'd agree it's not as easy as it once was). The problem is the documentation is lagging behind the development - in some cases pretty severely.<p>But what do you do? Slow down? Not sure that's good either.

I too get a feeling of "change for the sake of change" from Rails at times. That's obviously not something they're doing, as all the changes have some motivation, but at times it feels a bit like churn.<p>At one point in time, you did forms like &#60;%= form .... and then they switched to &#60;% form .... do and now they've switched back to &#60;%= form ... do again.<p>Also, the upgrade to Rails 3 is not an easy one. Yeah, you get some nice stuff, but because it's so painful, it's not happening for a lot of people, which is causing more problems.<p>All in all, I still think it's the best thing going in web development today for what I do, and am not contemplating alternatives.

The assets pipeline feels horrible, it's really slow. I upgraded to Rails 3.1rc, realized it fights with Heroku unless upgrading to the Cedar stack. Lesson learned: stay away from Rails release candidates. But I downgraded to Rails 3.0.8 because 3.1 was just more of a hassle starting out. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, usually when I'm fighting the framework it's a sign that I don't fully understand something. I loved Rails 3.0 when it was announced, but I share the same sentiment as the OP re: 3.1 at the moment.

If you're hesitant to be an early adopter (AKA "guinea pig") Rails 2.3.x is very stable, and most of the useful plugins in the Rails ecosystem are still maintained for Rails 2.3.x.<p>Many big names are still on Rails 2.3.x, too. Forgive me if I go astray here, but GitHub and DocumentCloud are two examples that come to mind.

I think the author is conflating two issues - (1) learning Rails and (2) keeping up with the latest developments in Rails.<p>I agree with the author that (2) is getting harder - but this is the price you pay for improvement.<p>I disagree that (1) is getting to be overly difficult. By and large, the changes to Rails 3 and Rails 3.1 make it easier for developers to do more advanced things with Rails. If you just look at the simple tutorial applications that newcomers to Rails are starting out with, I don't think their complexity has increased very much from Rails 2 to 3 to 3.1. Yes, they are different from version to version, but this doesn't matter to the newcomer.<p>TL;DR - the framework has more functionality, which makes it more difficult to learn the entire framework, but it is not significantly more difficult to learn how to accomplish any given task.

My brother, who is a novice programmer, picked up the rails basics in a couple weeks (with some help, of course). He was able to create the app he set out to, going from zero experience to a fully functioning app in 2 months.<p>If you are having trouble with rails, it's for two possible reasons... 1) you won't accept that it's opinionated software and throw out your preconceptions or 2) you're just not trying hard enough. The amount of books, screencasts, tutorials, podcasts out there for rails is just insane. I'm completely jealous these things weren't around in '06 when I started.<p>Edit: Should have mentioned that he did the Michael Hartl screencasts/tutorial (<a href="http://ruby.railstutorial.org/" rel="nofollow">http://ruby.railstutorial.org/</a>)

&#62; But we’re making it harder and harder for anyone to join the club from scratch.<p>That's a brilliant point. Some time ago I wanted to try out RoR to create a fast prototype. It turned out, that if you need just one prototype and if you don't know RoR, you'd be way faster if you use things you already know or just read the short Sinatra manual instead of spending weeks of learning only to be able to START the development.

I agree that the barrier for entry to Rails is quite high. To really get into it, you might have to learn:<p>* A new language<p>* A new framework<p>* A new programming paradigm<p>* A new set of libraries<p>This is going to be really hard if you're currently a spaghetti coder. Will you learn a lot? Will you become a better programmer? Will you enjoy coding more? I say yes!

As a beginner who started trying to learn rails from 1.2-2.0 I just wanted to say that Rails was never simple with all its magic and metaprogramming. "Blog in 15 minutes" is about being productive.<p>Defaults, conventions and DSL's are for less code only. You still have to know the rules. (Both DSL and what's underneath it.)<p>Javascript is not simple - so we have CoffeeScript. HTML isn't - there's HAML. (1 line of code to add it to Rails 3.1) Web applications are now more complex - client logic finally moved to /app folder.) We can still enable old routing (uncommenting one line).<p>But you have to learn bundler for dependency management, know application.rb configuration options, etc.<p>So I don't get what 'simple' about that technology stack. It's DRY and rather flexible, but not simple.

Good things are happening. I am glad to see more attention to front-end stuff. What's so scary there? I am using SCSS and CoffeeScript outside the Rails too (for WordPress themes) and I do pack my JS and compress my CSS. This is how it should be done and I am glad to see it is default in RoR.

Over time, Rails changes to make it easier to deal with the complex needs of web applications.<p>Part of that is changing things to make things more orderly, so you can actually find your way around a complex application without too much wasted effort. That places demands on developers, especially when migrating, but makes it easier in the future.<p>The amount of power you can weld in the present is dependent on how much capability you acquired in the past. You can always enter a battle with your bare fists and no learning curve, but if someone gives you a free sword, learning to use it before the battle is more likely to lead to victory.<p>This is not learning for the sake of learning. But even learning for the sake of learning grows your ability to learn.

My biggest issue with rails was more getting my development environment setup. Constant gem compilation issues, I spent hours resolving them. Aside from that I haven't had much trouble stepping into the language or the new environment.

I don't think Rails never was about been quick to learn. It was about being easy to use (once you had bothered to learn to use it, or at least the basics). I don't think that has changed.

lol this is just some pay your dues nonsense. "You will love rails if you begin at the start like we all did"<p><a href="http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/" rel="nofollow">http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/</a> (probably not relevant for HN) <a href="http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book" rel="nofollow">http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book</a> <a href="http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/quickstart" rel="nofollow">http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/quickstart</a>

I do agree that defaulting to have SASS and Coffeescript on unecessarily increases the learning curve for new adopters. Along with HAML they're fantastic technologies but in many cases you're asking people to learn Ruby, Rails, HAML, SASS and/or Coffescript all at once now.<p>Make the base setup as such that it minimizes what they have to learn to achieve some success, and let them turn on technologies such as HAML/SASS/Coffeescript later on once the cognitive load of switching to Ruby and Rails has decreased.

I think it's quite telling that DHH frequently tweets his opposition to aspects of what is happening with Rails, and that Yehuda quit the core team.<p>In a world where some time on the core team can land someone $300K per year in salary + speaking + book deals, there is bound to be this sort of chaos. I view the push toward agnosticism as a misguided attempt to be the "one true framework" and also to salve the egos of those whose decisions and work are being undone.

i found the ever changing world of rails intimidating when i first started and that was in the wonderful world of 1 moving to 2 but at the end of the day all you really need is to get the same version of rails that your book/tutorial covers and stick with it..

I used to be a rails developer. After rails upgraded to 3.1, I switched to Padrino and haven't looked back

(1) Regarding the article: boo f-ing hoo. (2) Why Rails 3.1 <i>actually</i> is blowing it: There is no way to turn off concatenation of js/css files in development! WTF? Have these guys ever developed a client heavy app before? That is a total non-starter. I love how the entire goal was to make js a first class rails citizen but you can only debug these files in firebug as one giant file! What a f-up!

It feels like Rails is slowly dying. It doesn't have the broad penetration of PHP, and most folks taking up a scripting language today choose Python.