Rails is omakase

What is this post responding to? And who is the target audience?<p>Reading this feels exactly like reading the passive aggressive facebook posts of someone currently in a fight with their boy/girlfriend. We get it, Rails is "opinionated", sorry I guess we're saying "omakase" these days. Who really gives a fuck?<p>The reason DHH is getting loud complaints is because people feel that they carry a legitimate grievance but also feel no way to voice that opinion (or are trolls). Douchetastic talking down to them like exemplified in this post won't help (and will encourage trolls).<p>People with limited knowledge and understanding of something and/or restricted mobility in tech aren't in a place to see things the way you see them. Help them get to that place, instead of just telling them how to see things with metaphors that only work once you're at that place. Or just don't engage them at all.<p>Edit: Huh. This DHH blog post doesn't really feel on par as a response to the conversation in that github issue. But if it is, know that my post was written assuming the criticism was of the type he describes, not the type that transpired.

Basically, here's the deal: this is a change that every member of Rails core (and others with commit, like me) who is not an employee of 37 Signals disagrees with, as well as the entire maintenance team of Bundler. Every single one. And DHH's response is that we all 'haven't really paid much attention to how things are run on a day-to-day basis.'<p>This change 'breaks every single new Rails app on Heroku that uses rbenv', in the words of Heroku's Ruby platform lead. It is not a trivial change. This is David going against the wishes of every other maintainer of every other piece of software Rails works with, as well as other Rails maintainers, and then painting their comments as 'nerd rage' and 'organizational failures.'<p>Ugh.

Alright, somebody has to draw the line somewhere.<p>Every time DHH goes off on one of his little rants and angers a lot of people in the process it's not just those people that get affected, and not just emotionally either. These Ruby [on Rails] dramas have a real-world impact on the rest of us, the hundreds of thousands of us that use Rails every day to make a living. It affects us in that it makes us all look like unprofessional schoolground children. Rails already has a stigma of "hipster" developers that tend to be up their own asses, and episodes like this really don't help our image. Especially not when the global developer community is not as massive as you'd like to believe, especially when people talk - to other developers, to potential and existing clients that then get per-conceptions of unprofessionalism, and to newbie developers that shy away and look into alternative languages and frameworks because they don't want to be associated with this wankery.<p>DHH's post, particularly the second paragraph, seriously comes across as if the core "team of chefs" is doing us all a massive favour and if we want to keep benefiting from the really beautiful thing that Rails is then we should shut the fuck up and take what we're given. Well this isn't Pyongyang (if we're going to play with metaphors) and DHH is not our dear leader. Yes of course I, and all the other Rails developers and immensely grateful for the framework's existence, but it's OSS now. There are thousands of contributors and so many more times commits than that to the projects since it did become OSS.<p>The community either needs a revolution or a fork because this downward spiral of foul air is just going to continue spreading and affecting us all. I'm sure if a couple of well respected individuals decided to take that route, a whole lot of people would back them up - I know I sure as hell would.<p>Pawel - a Rails developer.

Just read the whole thread here and on github (<a href="https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/61b91c4c55bcbd5a2ec85d6e1c67755150653dff" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/61b91c4c55bcbd5a2ec85d...</a>)<p>Technical: DHH is wrong, plain and simple. No amount of defending the decision makes it right.<p>Community Management: DHH, while not as abrasive as Linus (another thread here linked to a kernel thread), IMO, DHH is (much) worse than Linus. Linus is abrasive and swears and yells. DHH is dismissive and condescending. DHH thinks he has better opinions, more depth of experience, smarter, more insight and generally "gets it" more than everyone around him, including the other maintainers.

This site doesn’t tell its encoding (neither via HTTP nor via meta tags), so my Firefox displayed the first sentence as “There are lots of ГЎ la carte software...”.<p>Also, I don’t understand why the article was written, every software developer makes their own decisions that not everyone will like — isn’t that obvious?

Aren't all frameworks like this? The designer picks what he/she thinks is the best architecture and builds it around that idea. That's why there are a thousand different frameworks. I think DHH is experiencing what I call "Linus Hell." Which is the hell Torvalds has to go through every <i>n</i> amount of time when dealing with obtuse programmers.

This is why I like the Clojure community, which in this regard is very different from Rails. Clojure has developed a culture that favors small libraries over monolithic frameworks. The eco-system of Clojure is all about picking and choosing among a variety of tasty dishes, which is the exact opposite of this:<p>"Rails is not that. Rails is omakase. A team of chefs picked out the ingredients, designed the APIs, and arranged the order of consumption on your behalf according to their idea of what would make for a tasty full-stack framework. The menu can be both personal and quirky. It isn't designed to appeal to the taste of everyone, everywhere."<p>The folks who like omakase are of course free to enjoy Rails. More power to them. I personally learn more, and enjoy more, when I get to assemble a different menu for each project -- a menu suited to the project.

DHH vexes me on a few issues but I respect his passion for what he believes Rails should be.<p>The conventions being enforced result in existing Rails code being easier to penetrate for new team members and more maintainable over time than was the case pre-Rails for web apps.<p>Rails is stronger for it.

The analogy here is just off. DHH might consider just saying "I have good intentions. Rails is my thing. I will ultimately make the choices but do consider feedback."<p>The reason the analogy is off: when was the last time you went into a restaurant and said, "i'm going to base my work/livelihood on this menu"? Never. Sometimes when I go for a meal I know what I want and I order that. Often I'm looking for an experience and I'll ask, "If the chef were going to die tomorrow what would they eat tonight?". Omakase is a formalized way to see what the chef recommends at that moment in time.<p>Rails is not the same as me going into a restaurant looking for a great experience at that moment. I might have a mind-blowing meal but I'm not going to base my livelihood on it.<p>I'm not saying that DHH or Rails are flaky. I am saying that comparing a serious tool for serious work to omakase/the whims of the chef does Rails a disservice.

He lost me at "á la carte". Incidentally, no proper unicode support is why I never used rails (or ruby) for anything more than a tutorial. Yes, that was a long time ago.

There's an old saying that goes something like, the lower the stakes, the more bitter and destructive the disagreement. It goes along with that old anecdote about how the disputes among people involved in volunteer organizations are more charged than in situations where money is involved.<p>In this case, this drama was triggered by... a one-line change to the default gitignore file.

Rails doesn't have to be a one size fits all framework if you use it as a web delivery mechanism. That is the point of the Obvious Architecture <a href="http://obvious.retromocha.com/" rel="nofollow">http://obvious.retromocha.com/</a> You can see an example "twitter" app here: <a href="https://github.com/RetroMocha/obvious_status" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/RetroMocha/obvious_status</a><p>In the case of my example you could swap out the /delivery/web/app.rb or delivery/api/app.rb out for rails no problem. You wouldn't need to change any of the code in /app or /external to do so whatsoever.<p>Just because DHH thinks you should write your code one way and you don't agree doesn't mean you have to throw rails away entirely to have a different or better structure. Rails might be opinionated, but that's just like their opinion man.

I think it'd be funny if one day they even start prescribing the production environment via a Vagrant box.

So use Sinatra instead of Rails and create the stack and build system that works for you.<p>People are way too into Rails...

I've come to enjoy Rails defaults and "just solve the business problem" attitude, coming from ASP.Net MVC3 it's a breath of fresh air.<p>It's quite liberating to have things have a default naming convention and location. I can imagine it makes working on teams exceedingly easier other alternatives.

Rails has become extremely popular over the years, but we have to remember that in the end it's a software created by a guy containing his particular beliefs. And this is great! A good web framework need its own set of core beliefs.

This is assuming that those who make rails are master chefs. This is debatable.<p>Also, the analogy does not hold well because at a sushi bar, the one who orders is the end consumer. Rails is a tool for developers so a more accurate metaphor would be I am the chef, my customer orders omakase and Rails supplies all my tools and ingredients. If those tools and ingredients are what I need to make my customer happy, then great. If not, then I'd prefer to throw them away and do it right instead of dogmatically defending my framework like it's a religion.

Granted, everyone should be able to choose their own tools. But different tools can sometimes (in extreme cases) create inconsistent behavior. And you don't want to see the consequences of that roll into production.<p>That's the one reason I wouldn't recommend each dev using a different package manager.<p>However, if we follow that logic, only experienced devs will venture to choose a different package manager. Which implies that he/she would be knowledgeable enough to edit his own .gitignore and whatnot.

I guess that makes Python/Django an international buffet.

Come on, this isn't how porn stars work! Now, someone diagram this discussion and put it up on slideshare.

There appears to be a lot of disgruntlement about rails lately. I like Rails but switched to Sinatra about 5 years ago b/c I didn't like Rails 2 and realized that the Rails APIs were a lot less stable than I'd expected.<p>DHH is right, there is no reason to complain.

Does DHH post regularly? His "Archive" shows 3 posts in the last 4 days, you'd think he'd have more history posting.<p><a href="http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/archive.html" rel="nofollow">http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/archive.html</a>

Just saw Tenderlove's tweet, which is pretty funny "while we're at it, we should check in the .so files too. Binfiles won't work so well without them."

á la carte. UTF-8. Use it :-)

I think what this guy is trying to say is that Ruby on Rails is . . . on rails.

Is anyone else suddenly craving some unagi?

&#62; "Nobody ever got to have a meaningful impact on the direction of Rails by contributing no code and just showing up in a Github comment thread and yelling about the evils of CoffeeScript"<p>I think it sums up some kind of state of mind on the internet today. it's not just about software or programming.