Giving up on Rails: programmer un-happiness

On Aug 2, 8:16 pm, schruthensis [email protected] wrote:

  1. Difficult integration with existing technologies.
    b) apache: a million steps (including fastCGI) and it still
    doesn’t work. (I’d been using WEBRick)

Hi schruthensis.

You raise good points, some thing do need to be looked at.

However, it is unfortunate that you’ve already come to the conclusion
that Rails sucks. The Ruby on Rails support mailing list and the IRC
channel are both excellent places to get support, and had you asked
about your problems, people would have been able to help you.

For example, you mentioned deployment (FastCGI, Apache, etc). With
Phusion Passenger (www.modrails.com), deployment really is as easy as
PHP, i.e. you upload the files, define an Apache virtual host, and
you’re done. Phusion Passenger has been released for several months
now, and it’s a shame that you don’t know about its existence.

Other things, such as table naming, are also easily solvable. It’s
either documented in the API docs (which, I agree, is a bit hard to
navigate through for the newbie) or people would have told you about
it. You just put “table_name ‘people’” in your model. Done.

As for me, I started about 2 years ago. I wrote a customer management
system in 4 weeks, including unit tests and integration tests, and
it’s still running fine up to today. If I used PHP it would have taken
me at least twice as long, and I wouldn’t have written unit tests.

Finally, you seem to be under the impression that you can use Rails
without Ruby. Sorry, but that’s not true, you must know the
programming language first. It’s really easy, I only took a weekend to
learn the base language. At first, I didn’t understand Rails. After
taking a weekend to learn Ruby, I was suddenly much more productive in
Rails.

On 2008-08-22 10:13, Lloyd L. wrote:

Your story is typical of those that use RoR. However, the problem that
schruthensis describes is that he cannot even get it going to find OUT
how good it is. I find that I am in the same boat.

The boat where you try to be a sysadmin without any previous
experience? Well what did you expect?

Jump in a chatroom and get someone to walk you through it, or hire
someone. People aren’t born being good at installing software.

It is a lot of time and effort to expend with nothing to show for it,
especially when there is a boss glaring with looks of recrimination for
“lack of productivity.”

I certainly hope you don’t think Rails is some silver bullet. Even
after you get it installed there’s still a ton to learn. It will be
at least several months before you’re “fast” with it.

While I am not quite under the same gun as
schruthensis, still 8 days with nothing to show is stressful and I can
empathize with him.

Learning under a deadline is doomed to failure. You should be
learning this on your own time, then bringing your new skills into
the workplace after a certain level of mastery is achieved. Even if
the boss is letting you learn Rails on the job you’re not going to
immedietly begin to dish out new projects really fast.

p.s. I have bought books by the stack and ebooks by the disk load.

And I suspect you’ve not finished a one of them. Ruby is drop-dead
simple to install. Rails is only slightly more difficult. Hire
someone to do your initial hand-holding if this sort of stuff is over
your head. You could even get a cheap web-hosting account with
everything already installed.

I
have read through them and they all show the magic occurring after ruby
is up and running. Go figure. Anyway, it is not the books that give
the answers either.

Then look elsewhere.

For example I refer to this for a new Mac or Linux setup:

If you use windoze then google for “instant rails”.

As far as books, “Ruby for Rails” by David Black is excellent for
complete beginners.


Greg D.
http://destiney.com/

Hi It’s me schruthensis = dschruth (sorry for the confusion with my
nickname change)

Before people go crazy trying to continue to side or oppose with me on
this issue… I think I should make it clear that I schruthensis (now
dschruth) have solved many of my problems as I stated earlier today
in my post. Thus, I’m no longer on the side anymore that you may
have assumed I was still on. I’m happy now! I love rails and will
continue to use it. We could even consider this thread closed if you
like. I didn’t mean to get it going again by posting… I think
the name change thing confused people

One last thing if forgot to mention in my last post (yesterday) was
that I also even found and fixed a plural/singular renaming bug in
rails!
http://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8995/tickets/28-activesupport-inflections-rb-incorrect-singularization-of-ses-to-sis-words#ticket-28-1
This is the very first time I’ve ever participated in any open source
project really. … Proof that you too can learn to appreciate how
easy this can be!

On Aug 2, 11:34 am, Frederick C. [email protected]

On Aug 2, 9:10 pm, “Greg D.” [email protected] wrote:

  1. Unstable documentation
    a) old 1.x tutorials that don’t work with the recent 2.x downloads

And? This seems a non-problem to me. If you’re using a 2.x Rails,
then look for the 2.x series tutorials.

I think he’s referring to the fact that rubyonrails.org still links to
the old 1.x tutorials. Which is pretty confusing for newcomers. It
should link to some nice 2.x tutorials.

Wikis are a community effort. If you find a mistake please correct it
for the next person who comes along.

The Wiki does need a large overhaul. The problem is of course: who’s
going to do that? There seems to be little motivation in the community
at the moment.

That might be partially caused by the fact that the Wiki is so large.
Maybe starting over from scratch will give people the motivation to
contribute high-quality Wiki content.

schruthensis wrote:

I’m not a programmer. I’m a designer that learned Lasso, then PHP and
now Ruby and Rails. I don’t think I’ll ever become a programmer as I
always need to look things up and I still miss some basic understanding
of programming. But maybe I’m wrong. After many years with HTML and CSS
I write it more or less fluently so there might be some hope after all.
Anyway, I recognize your thoughts.

  1. I don’t know Ruby

I feel this is essential in order to get deeper into Rails. Ruby is by
far the easiest language I’ve encountered yet.

  1. A bad experience with ruby 1.8.6 p 230 (STILL!? the most prominent
    link on the rails download page)

This part has always been easy for me.

  1. Unstable documentation

Wow. So true. In my eyes a major problem or THE problem. Good
documentation is key for someone like me, and people alike. In this
respect I must give PHP manual credit.

I also believe there is a problem with basic understanding of
pedagogics. I feel that many programmers have a problem with that. They
explain B but leave out A, if you see what I mean. Of course it’s a
question of what level you’re on. But as I see it Ruby is so simple that
it shouldn’t be that hard to add in the missing parts.

Let me give you and example that I think proofs this. I’m stuck with a
problem with PayPal and IPN verification. How come there are so many
having problems and making recurring questions about this here when it’s
a question of a few lines of code? I don’t get this. There must be
something very wrong here. But then again, this not only restricted to
Ruby or Rails. It’s a general problem.

Then you have those who give you answers like “this is not Rails, this
is a Ruby question” and just leaves you with that, very well aware that
it’s a thin line between them. Or those you say “read the manual first
before you ask” and so on. You probably recognize the type. Not very
constructive.

  1. Difficult integration with existing technologies.
    b) apache: a million steps (including fastCGI) and it still
    doesn’t work. (I’d been using WEBRick)

Try Litespeed. I can really recommend it.

Good luck with Rails.

I’m not sure if anyone suggested this, but why not just save time and
get
Aptana, Eclipse, or Netbeans? I believe they all support RoR
development.

On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 1:32 PM, Lloyd L. <

On Aug 23, 2008, at 11:32 AM, Lloyd L. wrote:

I have installed plenty of software. I am looking at tutorials that
say
that it is super easy and that it can be done in a matter of minutes
with the “rolling with ruby on rails” tutorial. I was believing
what I
was reading. It should have been straightforward, if the literature
and
posters were to be believed.

I’m assuming you’re using Windows. I know that’s the default in a lot
of places, but it wouldn’t be on this list.
If so, I believe with NetBeans you’re ready to go out of the box.
(once you’ve installed NetBeans, of course.)
That would get you over the hurdle. Getting started on other platforms
is very easy.

On 2008-08-23 07:32, Lloyd L. wrote:

Holy smokes! Are you saying that only a sysadmin can install instant
rails or did you just choose that so you could say something snotty?

I’m saying bone up on your basic sysadmin skills before you go blaming
Rails or Ruby for your own inability to get it up and running.


Greg D.
http://destiney.com/

Gee Greg, you seem extremely harsh by Ruby standards. Perhaps you are a
Lisp programmer lurking here?

Greg D. wrote:

On 2008-08-22 10:13, Lloyd L. wrote:

Your story is typical of those that use RoR. However, the problem that
schruthensis describes is that he cannot even get it going to find OUT
how good it is. I find that I am in the same boat.

The boat where you try to be a sysadmin without any previous
experience? Well what did you expect?

Holy smokes! Are you saying that only a sysadmin can install instant
rails or did you just choose that so you could say something snotty?

Jump in a chatroom and get someone to walk you through it, or hire
someone. People aren’t born being good at installing software.

I have installed plenty of software. I am looking at tutorials that say
that it is super easy and that it can be done in a matter of minutes
with the “rolling with ruby on rails” tutorial. I was believing what I
was reading. It should have been straightforward, if the literature and
posters were to be believed.

It is a lot of time and effort to expend with nothing to show for it,
especially when there is a boss glaring with looks of recrimination for
“lack of productivity.”

I certainly hope you don’t think Rails is some silver bullet. Even
after you get it installed there’s still a ton to learn. It will be
at least several months before you’re “fast” with it.

If you actually read what I posted I said that I could not eve get to a
“hello world” in 8 days. That is enough for anyone to get frustrated
and you are definitely not helping.

While I am not quite under the same gun as
schruthensis, still 8 days with nothing to show is stressful and I can
empathize with him.

Learning under a deadline is doomed to failure. You should be
learning this on your own time, then bringing your new skills into
the workplace after a certain level of mastery is achieved. Even if
the boss is letting you learn Rails on the job you’re not going to
immedietly begin to dish out new projects really fast.

Again, READ what I wrote. I said that I was NOT “under the same gun”
and I was NOT on a deadline. Part of the excercise was to see how easy
it was to get something going from scratch as other people would have do
be doing that where I work. Learning and doing on the go was the test.
I did not start from scratch because I am a goober but thanks for
intimating it in an open forum.

p.s. I have bought books by the stack and ebooks by the disk load.

And I suspect you’ve not finished a one of them. Ruby is drop-dead
simple to install. Rails is only slightly more difficult. Hire
someone to do your initial hand-holding if this sort of stuff is over
your head. You could even get a cheap web-hosting account with
everything already installed.

When it comes to a book, “finishing” can mean reading it cover to cover.
If that is the criteria, then I have. If it means doing every example
and making it work the OF COURSE I did not otherwise I would not be
having this problem. As that it obvious to the most casual observer, I
suspect that you are again saying things this way to be snotty and take
cheap shots at me. This seems reinforced when you say at this point
that rails is only slightly more difficult than drop-dead simple to
install. Well, when you took the cheap shot earlier you said that my
wanting to install rails, which is the whole point of what I have been
saying, was me trying “to be a sysadmin without any previous
experience.” I am impressed that you know what my experience is. The
change from accusing me of delusions of grandeur to being so stupid that
I cannot “install software” on the very same point of contention shows
that you are just being confrontational and abusive.

I
have read through them and they all show the magic occurring after ruby
is up and running. Go figure. Anyway, it is not the books that give
the answers either.

Then look elsewhere.

That is why I am posting here, Einstein! I read the books and spent
time to try to do it on my own. I only posted here when I could not get
past the obstacle. To post earlier would be trying to get someone else
to do my work for me and I am not that way. That is point of a forum
like this is it not?

Perhaps you are just having a bad day, but please do not compound my bad
day with your own/

I’m using Linux, but I think on Windows it would be the same process. I
just
installed Ruby 1.8 and then installed Gems. From there I just used Gems
to
install Rails. That’s really all I did to get the whole thing running.
All
the IDE’s I mention should detect and use what you installed. I know
Aptana
and Netbeans did for me. I believe both also install the Gems for you if
you
have that setup. I did the Gems myself though.

On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 6:03 PM, Lloyd L. <

On Aug 23, 7:32 pm, Lloyd L. [email protected]
wrote:

Holy smokes! Are you saying that only a sysadmin can install instant
rails or did you just choose that so you could say something snotty?

I’m not the one you’re replying to, but what he said is not without
reason. Would you trust a driver who doesn’t have a driver’s license?

While you do not need to be a full-fledged sysadmin, is it so
unreasonable to expect some basic sysadmin skills? Skills that can
be acquired by reading a Unix book in a weekend, even.

But back to Rails. Yes, you absolutely need to learn Ruby before you
can use Rails. It isn’t a snotty statement, it’s just a fact. You
can’t become an airplane pilot without knowing English. A student is
not allowed to take some courses until he has passed some other
courses. Some things just require certain skills.

That said, some things certainly should be easier. The documentation
needs work, but it seems few people are motivated to work on them.

Hongli L. wrote:

I’m not the one you’re replying to, but what he said is not without
reason. Would you trust a driver who doesn’t have a driver’s license?

Actually, I drove a tractor reliably and was trusted with it long before
I was of age to obtain a driver’s license, so yes. By the same token,
there are those with their license I do NOT trust.

But back to Rails. Yes, you absolutely need to learn Ruby before you
can use Rails. It isn’t a snotty statement, it’s just a fact. You
can’t become an airplane pilot without knowing English.

Well, actually you can be a pilot without speaking English. I will
assume that you cannot be a licensed commercial pilot without speaking
English. And I do NOT think that I must master Ruby before I run the
“rolling with ruby on rails” tutorial. That is not what the tutorial
indicates and, having traded a few emails with the author, it is not
what HE believes.

Remember that I am not trying to get something cool or even something
useful going at this point. I am just trying to get something going
and get the boss to believe that we can use ruby at work. Then, I can
get paid to learn it. I thought that would be really cool.

On 24 Aug 2008, at 13:07, Lloyd L.
<[email protected]

wrote:

But back to Rails. Yes, you absolutely need to learn Ruby before
what HE believes.
It may be possible but it’s not the path of least resistance ( and
probably doesn’t end well when air traffic control are telling you to
do stuff ). You don’t need to be a ruby grandmaster but without a
basic grounding in the language I wouldn’t be surprised if you were
frequently confused

Fred

Justin S. wrote:

I’m not sure if anyone suggested this, but why not just save time and
get
Aptana, Eclipse, or Netbeans? I believe they all support RoR
development.

That is a good idea. I will give it a go. thanks!

I have spent the
last 8 days at work and I cannot even get a “hello world” to work in
rails.

p.s. I have bought books by the stack and ebooks by the disk load.

sorry for obtruding - try http://rubyforge.org/projects/openrorbook/

the tutorial is in german - but the images and/or the source code is
“international” :wink:

You see one of these posts every few weeks. Most the people have
already said what needs to be said. The one additional thing is maybe
you should look at getting a tutor for help? I know I have personally
tutored a few people (with NO programming experience) and they
continue to use rails everyday. IT wgot such a good response that I
launched a site to help find a tutor in the community, called Rubyme
http://www.rubyme.net

On Aug 23, 5:26 am, Pål Bergström [email protected]

I spoke on the phone with Bill W., who wrote “Rolling with Ruby on
Rails Revisited”. In short, he got me going. MANY thanks, Bill!

Also, I have downloaded Netbeans and I think that will do a very good
job for me, so thanks to Justin for pointing me in the right direction
there!

And now, to programming!