Ruby on Rails posted August 2014

I just pulled an all nighter on Rails. I like it. I really really like it.

I like Ruby. I like how everything makes sense. I like how things are pretty and I like how everything was setup for the perfect web developing experience.

Before that I used Django, and I didn't like it. Oh sure I didn't use it enough to have a real opinion on it. But my first impression was bad. The way it handled the static files, the namespaces ( /templates/blog/blog/ ), the way everything seemed to be made up and counter-intuitive. I didn't like it because it felt limited and forced, almost unnatural.

And well before that I used CodeIgniter, which I really like because it's dead simple and it leaves you a huge amount of liberties. This blog is made in CodeIgniter by the way.

But back to Rails. Here's what I like:

• There is a convention. And it feels nice to be guided for once. There is a way to do things and you feel like you are coding correctly when you respect them. For example a controller should be a plural noun in CamelCase, like "Bears", and its respective model should be the singular noun, in this case "Bear". Database tables have to use the snake_case. And on and on.

• There is beauty in ruby. The unless, the ?, the symbols, the syntax, the blocks, the... I like it. It looks beautiful and feels good to write.

• Everything is already prepared for you. There is CoffeeScript, Sass, jQuery, jQuery-ujs, turbo-link, ... and There is so much that is just waiting to be served. A gem away.

I feel dumb for having waited so long to take the leap. I heard of Rails years ago but couldn't see the point. I remember thinking Ruby was weird. Boy... Things are gonna get so much easier when I'll have a good understanding of this beast!