Does Ruby Suffer From An Overabundance Of Choice? | Hacker News Reader

Does Ruby Suffer From An Overabundance Of Choice?

rubyinside.com

24 pointsdesigooner8 comments

Maybe this isn't written down clearly everywhere but it should be. If you're new to ruby ALL you need to know is that everyone in production runs:

Rails 2 (currently at 2.3.8) Ruby 1.8.7 or REE (which are 100% compatible, since REE is only slightly different) MySQL or PostgreSQL + Memcached

That's the boring, vanilla, stack 90% of production sites run. That's why it's pretty much the only stack Heroku and Engineyard support. If you have special needs (Java interop, more performance, NoSQL, Async IO) then yeah, do your research. If you just want to write a regular plain RoR app like 90% of people the above advice will suit you fine.

You can have a full ruby environment with:

apt-get install ruby-full mysql-server

gem install rails

gem install mysql

Now, how hard was that?

You're right, it's not hard. However I have a challenge: Find me a website that says exactly that, comes up first in Google, and is promoted by other Rails sites.

You're right about that. But people shouldn't be learning rails from online tutorials, they should be reading Active Web Development with Rails which has clear instructions.

Learning new languages from random online tutorials is always going to be confusing because stuff on the net is either too cutting edge or too disorganized, no matter what language you're using (yes, even PHP).

I've got like 5 different tutorials over the web that say otherwise. More importantly, any Rails book is going to be out of date in less than 3 months.

Does anyone think we should have a slightly more bureaucratic approach to project and gem creation ?

For a rubyforge project, we do need to fill in a form. But gem creation can be done by anyone. There's no need to show some documentation, no need to justify why you've created yet another XYZ, or why its better that the alternatives.

Even rubyforge projects do not require any justification. We've got to delete projects that have not released ANY code for X period (blank projects).

What of projects that do not have proper documentation (take wikipedia for instance, where badly written pages get flagged off).

I've often griped about codeforpeople.com where there's no summary for what all those gems are for. You have to download each one and check the docs inside!

Very sensible article. I can scarcely improve upon it.

The choice is not the issue, its probably more categorization, and somehow having the good stuff bubble up and the bad/broken stuff sink.

We cannot totally rely on google searches, for often google brings up outdated articles that perhaps have a high number of hits, while something current does not show up.

I liked your para on READMEs and railscasts. I recently saw a video demo of a Java framework named "Play" -- really made me want to download and try it -- that kind of stuff can do wonders for a project.

This article is in response to another which is discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1590955

  The problem is that Ruby's documentation, main advocacy
  sites, and even most sites for popular Ruby libraries 
  (with one major exception - coming later) try too hard to
  demonstrate freedom

No, the main problem is that Ruby's documentation sucks. If it tried too hard to demonstrate freedom, it would at least demonstrate normal use cases. I point to http://ruby-doc.org/core/classes/File.html and I rest my case. I hereby promise to submit a patch for that documentation somewhere next week. It has bothered me for too long.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com