I Hate Ruby on Rails
Posted by Paul on January 6, 2006 in Uncategorized |
I hate it. I really do. Even the little bit I’ve done in it has completely spoiled me. Coding in RoR is like talking to a intelligent, beautiful woman. Coding in PHP is like talking to a pretty but stupid girl. Coding in ASP.NET is like trying to explain quantum mechanics to a .
And that’s why I hate it. I hate it because I can’t be with it all the time. I hate it because I can’t know more about it. It is the bane of my existence because it is so wonderful.
Change your organization!
I feel for you – I’m dealing with the same sort of mentality, except from the Java camp.
I wouldn’t be so frustrated if they would at least evaluate it.
Oh well – someday we will rule the world!
I’m got a small personal project that is about to launch (), and hope that it might help break me out.
Damn, and here I thought I found someone who agrees with me. Granted, anything is better than asp.net, but I hate rails. Truly.
I find the syntax horrible, the lack of good documentation ( and I don’t mean scouring the API. Yes, a published API is needed, but not to learn by, thank you ) , the limitations ( overriding everything that is supposed to make it good to overcome them is not an answer, try again ), the “rules” you must follow, the half-dozen SQL queries it makes for simple things, and most of all, getting non-trivial one table web apps to work is agony. Yes, agony.
I have programmed in java, C#, PHP, and Perl and by no means a master in any of them, I could get something, anything at all to work in less than one day. Rails? I spent two weeks trying to get a 7 table, simple app with just one, 1-N relationship and could not get it to function properly. I read the Agile book. I posted to ruby-forum.com ( plenty of replies, but no one could provide an answer. I guess it’s not as easy as claimed if no one could solve my simple request?).
I honestly am not trolling here. I’m trying to find out why people rave about it. Looping over a hash and it only returns the first pair? WTF? myhash.inspect shows 10 sets! Why doesn’t the iterator work!!? Trying to update a 1-N? More strange errors than I could count… I could go on, but you get the point. I’ve never encountered so much difficulty with something that is supposedly “simple”. Abstract? Sure. Simple? Ah, no. Things break in bizarre ways and you have nowhere to turn.
The rails site says “web development without the pain”. I sincerely beg to differ.
Java is not just for Web Development.
if you all you want is dynamic web site scripting
go PHP, Python.
Java shines when we are dealing with N-Tier Architecture, Distributed Objects, Distributed Transactions, Security, Messaging(MOM).
when High Availability,Fail Over, Load Balancing are important.
where we need to talk to Legacy systems using JCA
and talk to highly scalabale CORBA/C++ apps over IIOP.
i really wonder how any of those can be done in lame ruby.
JSP/Servlet and MVC frameworks are just part of the very big picture that was described earlier.
this is serious development, and needs serious and dedicated engineers.
for the rest of script kiddies who have no brain to understand highly scalable and complex systems, and just want to do a crappy dynamic website and think theyre cool , let them have it.
they are just script kiddies, let them play.
if you are scripting with PHP,Perl,Python, VB you may look into it.
Java and specifically Enterprise Java do not level with these scripting Toolz.
just looking at ruby syntax makes me wanna puke.
urrrghhhhhh.
Jason, RoR is not meant to replace Java. It’s meant to augment the tools that programmers have at their disposal. Obviously, you “have no brain” or you’d be able to pick up both languages and add it to your toolbelt.
And to address your assertion that only “script kiddies” use interpreted languages, here’s the site of a very heavy user of python: .
Retard.
I’m with you . After 9 months of suffering with trying to get a good RoR site working for my employer, I gave up, grabbed asp.net, and had the project done in 3 weeks.
OK, so I’m more familiar with microsoft products, but RoR drove me a little bit mad.
I understand there are pros and cons to all environments, but my two cents work with RoR errrch
I have been using ROR for a few months and it is the worst language I have used to date.
I thought it was supposed to up development time.
Instead 5 months later we are struggling on simple things that could easly be implemented through a high level development tool for JSP / JSF
We have switched and have noticed a much better and faster development cycle.
I personally do not recommend ROR.
It looks like only the books do.
I have now finished 3 projects in PHP while the others are still trying to get the first ROR project to work.
Simple things that are accomplished in PHP and JSP take too long and are most frustrating using the syntax.
I dislike having wasted 6 months on it and do not recommend it to anyone.
I agree with Jason.
ROR code makes me want to puke.
I hate it.
I use Java for enterprise development.
We wasted over half a year trying to get the Ruby on Rails to work.
Its a mess and I personally hate it.
Rails has made me hate web development!
I wonder what OS the RoR haters are using. I’m trying to learn RoR using a Win machine and am finding it a farkin’ nightmare. One thing after the other doesn’t work. I thought it was supposed to be beautiful and elegant, but it’s ugly as all hell.
The scary part is that I’m using Basecamp to manage my Rails project with a friend and Basecamp (a Rails app) has got problems that look Rails farkin’ up the SQL, e.g. output not properly grouped resulting in duplicate output.
Anyway, those 37 Signals folks are some serious spin doctors. I hope all the hype wasn’t just from their marketing prowess. I’d hate to have wasted all this time.
MTI, what do you like about Rails?
I have very mixed feelings about Rails. Sure, it is very speedy, can be very efficient, yadda yadda yadda. Maybe its my lack of experience with the language, but I do find that doing some chores takes me the longest time.
Also there are the caveats and gotchas that I hate. I created a rather simple CRUD application using AjaxScaffold and got it working in virtually no time. Then came adding security here and there and the whole thing got a bit tedious, but still doable. Couple of months after deployment I get a call from the customer, saying the application isn’t even booting up. WTF? I check the logs and keep getting some obscure error. After searching high and low for a cure, I find out that my gems updated themselves and broke the application. Solution is fairly easy and I learn about freezing applications. And I know that if I had put some settings here and there, it would have been avoided. But still, WTF? The application gets all crappy because these guys cannot make components backward compatible?
And even further, the logs kept showing some warning messages: this and that feature should not be used and will be removed from the next version (i.e. either freeze the application NOW or your application will surely DIE).
I love the whole gem thing, installing from the command line and getting to work without having to browse thru a million jar files, and I love the simplicity of the language itself. Still, I believe that it is not ready for just about everything, not yet anyways. CRUD applications are so freaking easy to make with Rails as are so many other type of applications but I just don’t see it replacing any of the big guns for big projects, not yet anyway.
Most of the hype behind Rails is just people coming from languages such as Java and VB that hate the cumbersome nature of those languages’ syntax and the complexity to build even the most simple things. But I will take complex and stable/scalable with a bit longer development time over simple yet unstable/moody any day of the week.
I hate it. I hate it and I hate it’s face!
I have very limited experience, but it makes me sick to my stomach. It melted my brain having to use SSH!
I dealt with the beginnings, the the whole darn process ahead was frightening me. Working on it for 1.5 hrs drained me of all my energy, yet left me wired and crying for mommy. I have to keep running Linux commands the whole time? What? One site said THAT is “railsy”. Ugh.
Maybe I got the wrong impression, but there isn’t ANY info for ACTUAL newbies. I want ROR For Dummies, people.
I’m just a WordPress user, fairly new at PHP, but I kept reading about how great this thing was. They made it sound EASY!
It is 100% for computer geeks so computer geeky they should have government intelligence blasted into their genius brains. (I love Chuck.
)
I hate it, an I hate its self-important face!
Oh the link here is only hosted, not a script, because I wanted my WP-related blog posts to be IN the wp community. I DO code my own websites.
My THING is doing it all with WP and plugins. My domain for it isn’t ready yet (neither is that blog).
Oh and I hate how the “anti” post was fictitious. Ugh. Self-important poo, it is.
I come from a C#/ASP.NET, classic ASP, and Java/JSP background. I literally want to delete ruby on rails. I hate it with an unimaginable passion. It is unbelievably awful. After reading the comments from most of the people that have replied to the original lame blog entry I feel much better though. Honestly, I thought there was something wrong with me; I have a Ruby book, and two Rails books, and development is so slow and so difficult I really thought I must be doing something wrong. Sure the examples in the agile book are great, and easy, but the moment, and I meant THE MOMENT, that you try to do something outside of those examples everything turns to crap. RoR makes it damn near impossible to implement the simplest of things. Not to beat a dead horse here, but like everyone else has said, where the heck is the documentation. Need something that’s not in the book, GOOD LUCK. You either have to figure it out yourself, or wait weeks in a forum (because nobody uses RoR) for someone that has struggled with the same problem that you are having to tell you that to fix the problem he switched to PHP, JSP, or ASP.NET. I HATE RUBY ON RAILS. PEACE OUT.
I read a tutorial on Rails which was on ONLAMP.com and saw couple video tutorials on you tube. The features and everything the technology promises is great. I tried to download/install/configure and get going and then i realized there is no proper documentation and they keep on breaking the existing stuff !! so the tutorials dont work !! the did that with dynamic scaffolding , it ticked me off , why would you wanna change things are done and break existing ways ?? I just cant understand that !!
It occurs to me that the Ruby Developers are very sharp, intelligent and perfectioniust developers but they suck at how they can keep it more workable and promote it !! I guess its certainly not the way to go !! They cud have done a lot better with the ideas they started with !!
Some of these comments just make me laugh. Seriously… if you can’t get RoR to work, what the hell are you doing in web development?
This might not be strictly accurate, but as I see it there are two main classes of procedural languages, not in the way they work but in the way they actually LOOK on the screen. And which one you prefer now influences which languages you will prefer in future. In the first camp, there are the flexible languages, full of symbols, usually loosely typed to some degree, and for some reason usually written entirely in lower case – languages like Perl, Ruby, and to some extent PHP. In the second, you have the verbose languages which on the face of it at least are backed by well structured and very neatly documented libraries and APIS – languages like Java and CSharp. I’ve got a hunch that people make up their mind about a new language in about 10 seconds, and it’s to do with which camp they grew up in.
I’m going to join the few voices here, and say Ruby and Rails suck a fat one. Went in with an open mind (I program in a lot of languages and frameworks), spent a year with a 100% Ruby on Rails only company, hated it with a passion. It’s called “rails” for a reason – you can only go ONE direction.
Why do I write anything when nobody bothers to read it
What I really hate about Ruby on Rails is all the hype. Ho, it is so simple to write a CRUD application! You fucking morons. How hard is it really to write a CRUD app in any decent framework that is not ROR. You have to be an idiot to find it in hard in Java or .NET. Go and suck a lemon you Ruby loving assholes.
Stay classy, Felipe
What a bunch of whiners…WHAAAA, moobie-boobie don’t like Ruby!
Wow, some strong emotions. I think I can understand why people are disappointed with Rails: there’s too much to learn. You can dive into Rails with a few tutorials but when you are on your own you need to know some Ruby. Preferably a lot of Ruby. The Rails crowd are probably also going to take for granted that you are using a similar environment and similar tools to what they are using and that means and OSX or Linux command line.
Ruby and Rails are both really amazing and ground-breaking but they are definitely more suited to people who are comfortable with an open source environment. Rails development on a Windows machine is going to be an exercise in frustration.
As for those that have worked in Rails for a year and still don’t like it, fair enough, try something else. I know people who still love Cobol.
RoR is garbage. Its for new programmers who don’t know what they’re doing, it tries to help you do everything.
What is the matter with you people? There are zillions of tutorials and videos (codeschool.com and railscasts.com to name but two) for newbies and seasoned programmers alike. Anyone who spent nine months trying to get a simple web app running with Rails and failed should find another avenue of work.