July 28, 2009 at 18:56Interview with DHH (Rails Creator)
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On July 25, twit.tv conducted an interview with David Heinemeier Hansson (for the uninitiated, the creator of Rails).
I advise you to listen to it yourself if there are no problems with English, and I outlined in Russian the main ideas about Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
I advise you to listen to it yourself if there are no problems with English, and I outlined in Russian the main ideas about Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
- Ruby, unlike other languages, is optimized for the convenience of programmers. This is its main advantage.
- In Ruby, you can even extend the base classes, so there is no need for new versions of the language; all DHH expects from new versions of Ruby is optimization in terms of memory usage and speed .
- The DRY principle should be applied on a global scale: programmers around the world solve the same typical problems over and over again - it would be great to get rid of these enormous losses of useful time.
- From Ruby, you can easily make a specialized language that is convenient to work in the right model - for example, to create sites.
- Ruby is a dynamic, but not a scripting language, you can write full-fledged applications on it.
- DHH loves monkey patching . A competent monkey patching works wonders, an example of miracles is the ActiveSupport library .
- Companies have no reason to switch to new technologies like Ruby on Rails from old and proven ones like PHP and Java. The transition always happens “from the underground” - this is how Perl came to big companies.
- The only way to switch to Rails is to do it on your own initiative, show your boss a working project, and prove that you can make a working project on Rails .
- The Internet is a global equalizer, both in terms of doing business and in terms of technology used. A team of programmer, designer, and ideologist is capable of the same achievements as a large corporation.
- Frameworks are not written on their own - they are extracted from working projects. Ruby on Rails was written for personal use, and only then was it extracted from Basecamp code, combed and documented.
- There is no uniformity in PHP; too many people contribute different opinions about even the most basic things. Therefore, chaos reigns in PHP.
- The idea of convention over configuration is that minor decisions need to be made only once, globally. Nobody cares what the primary key is called. If you agree in advance about such trifles, there is no need for huge configs, and someone else's code becomes much more understandable.
- “Intelligence can be more useful than choosing the name of a fucking primary key.”
- The REST model was chosen because it becomes clear with it how to group actions by controller; Before REST, there was a tendency to dump many unrelated actions into some MainController, i.e. in antipattern God Object .
- DHH uses OS X and Textmate. Vi (for some reason, namely Vi, not Vim) scares him, and BBEdit is dull.
- Someone already solved most of your everyday problems. This can and should be used.
- DHH keeps all its projects on GitHub and advises you. He, of course, uses git.
- Sites on Ruby on Rails - GitHub , Twitter , YellowPages.com , Hulu , 43things.com , urbandictionary.com . A more complete list is at rubyonrails.org/applications .
- Rails does not solve the problem of scaling, like any other framework. Scaling is always achieved by manual optimization.
- Ruby is not so difficult to learn, in addition, it is more visual and concise than languages like Java.
- Frameworks that follow the same course eventually merge. (e.g. Rails and Merb)
- Rails in two years is all the same Rails, but with a bunch of innovations. The team does not have any one global goal, but to improve the existing framework.