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Comment by skywhopper | Hacker News Reader

When I discovered Ruby 12 years ago, it was an amazing moment. All the features I loved from my previous favorite languages Perl, Smalltalk, and Scheme in one place, but with a much more reasonable syntax, a far more robust standard library, a complete and dead-simple packaging system, and a practical and portable runtime. The fact that it still feels magical, fun, practical, and pragmatic all at the same time while progressing and improving step by step each release after all these years is a truly amazing feat, especially when you compare it to its peers.

So congratulation and thanks to Matz, and all the other Ruby contributors for creating and maintaining and growing and improving this amazing language that's still my favorite. 2.5 looks great, and I can't wait to see what's in store for the future.

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I started a new contracting gig a couple of months ago, in Ruby. I had used it briefly years before in another project, but it was so long ago that I had to learn it again basically from scratch.

Although I don't really think the language is anything special (i.e. it's a standard dynamic OO language), what really turns me off Ruby is this dogmatic, almost religious aspect of its community.

Take POODR - it's more or less the community bible. If it's not written in POODR - don't do it. If it is - do it that way or else. It's POODR's way or the highway.

According to more experienced Rubyists more than 80% of the Ruby community use Rails. Rails is so widely spread that its development even fundamentally affects Ruby's roadmap.

Now irregardless of what you think about POODR or OO or dynamic types or whatever, a homogenous echo chamber filled with people chanting the same things over and over again is not a good thing.

As a counter example, take Javascript. Yes, it has its warts; its equality table is a joke. Ruby is a better thought out and implemented language in almost every aspect (although I do like Javascript's minimalism better, but that's a matter of taste I guess.) However, Javascript's community is as diverse, vibrant and experiment-friendly as it gets - there are the OO diehards, but there's also React, fantasy-land, macros, monads. People are trying out new things constantly.

Now I know you have monads in Ruby too or flow-like gradual typing libraries or rewrites of Clojure's spec. But at least where I work (and I work with some very experienced Ruby people) those libraries and the ideas they embody would never ever be considered as serious alternatives for anything. POODR or else.

What is POODR?

Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby by Sandi Metz.

http://www.poodr.com/

Thanks. Rubiest here for a decade and hadn't heard of it.

Same. I’ve seen Sandi speak and had a beer with her at Goruco like 10 years ago. Great speaker to be sure.

I’ve never encountered anyone as passionate as @pka suggests. Perhaps POODR is popular where they work but it’s far from universal amongst rubyists.

As a counterpoint, I have been writing Ruby as a primary language for about five years, both as an employee and a consultant. I am consistently solicited for advice on both code and architecture in Ruby by colleagues to positive results (and I do the same, don't get me wrong--that's how collegiate relationships should work). And, yet, I had to google what POODR was. I've also never used Rails; on this Christmas morning I'm noodling on a Grape API that uses grape-swagger for API documentation.

I have never seen any resistance to experiments or diversity in the space. There's a happy path, but there's plenty of room, and welcoming communities, outside of it.

(I like JavaScript, too, for much the same reasons you do.)

I'll pile on here with another counter data point to say that having written Ruby (both Rails and otherwise) for 7 years, and having read POODR, I do not understand where you're getting this dogma idea from. I have yet to experience a single instance of "It's POODR's way or the highway."

I've been writing Ruby for 4 years, and I had never heard of POODR before.

I've also never come across any particular dogma in the Ruby community -- there are established best practices for formatting code, but individual projects vary widely style and design decisions. Most Ruby codebases I've worked on come with a custom `.rubocop.yml`, and that's it.

On that note, I'll just plug that http://relaxed.ruby.style is a great starting point for most folks' less...idiosyncratic...Rubocop rules than come with the default.

This is great, thanks!

Huh... didn't even know what POODR was...

Guess I've been faking it for the past nine years... I mean, I did start a company that used Ruby/Rails as the primary platform. And I've worked the last six years in a shop that currently has a team of about 12 Ruby/Rails developers...

Don't get me wrong, Ruby's a tool in my toolbox; I use it like I would any other tool. I like solving problems. Most modern languages make it easy and fun to solve problems.

I don't like when it's easy to see where a language is encumbered by poor choices (I seem to have a diametrically opposed viewpoint of your opinion of the Javascript community; to me, the redundancy, low quality and churn of community libraries is one of Javascript's greater liabilities). But if it works for you, that's great.

Language Holy Wars are necessary for young, budding languages and young, budding programmers. Language Holy Wars help young communities draw others to their banner and young programmers define themselves. Unfortunately, having causes and "bad guys" is a big part of the underlying way we work as people.

But at some point, once a language's adoption has reached critical mass & once you've reached a point where you're comfortable with the underlying paradigms of programming, these Language Holy Wars get left behind for more interesting problems.

I mean, I definitely have opinions about what language I'd prefer to be working in and why, but at this point, I make my determination of technology based on the right tool for the job, not necessarily my opinion of any given language.

It's not just you. I've been running a company on Rails for four years - never heard of that book.

As a Ruby ops programmer who came to Rails via Chef I had no exposure to Sandi Metz or any of the other Ruby OO thinkers. However, several years later, now that I have read and integrated the ideas in POODR to my work, I highly recommend it.

Besides Sandi Metz, another Rubyist that I rate highly for delivering clear ideas about design is Avdi Grimm. His RubyTapas series quite radically changed my approach to building applications in Ruby.

Observe that programming in Rails doesn't intrinsically require an OO mindset. But when I reached the limits of the framework, knowing a thing or two about building rich OO domain models served me very well and helped avoid anti-patterns.

Thank you for the recommendation, I may just pick it up.

(To you and everybody else)

Point taken - apparently I mistook the particular echo chamber I happen to be in at that moment for a more general symptom. Glad to hear!

Sorry, I think I got a bit sidetracked in my response.

I do hope that your current situation gets better or that you find somewhere that isn't so preoccupied with navel gazing.

You may enjoy Practical Object Oriented Design with Ruby by Sandi Metz. Speaks about OO software design in very clear and easy to grasp way.

I often share it with non-ruby devs because it’s about design much more than it is about ruby.

Here are a couple of talks by the author which examplify her style of thinking and approaching problems.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=29MAL8pJImQ

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8bZh5LMaSmE

> Take POODR - it's more or less the community bible. If it's not written in POODR - don't do it. If it is - do it that way or else. It's POODR's way or the highway.

Sandi Metz would tell anyone espousing that the text written in POODR is to be taken at face value as gospel that they're completely wrong and completely missing the point. I've actually personally seen her correct this behavior at a conference and at a workshop and I've heard her say it many times in many places and mediums (podcasts, blogs, interviews).

Anyone who says "it's POODR or the highway" should be corrected, because they are very dangerous to any software engineering endeavor.

hey pka,

some comments here mention that they've been doing ruby for years and never even heard of poodr. i think that's less of a point.

it sounds more like you feel stifled at your current job. there's no right answer when it comes to a software stack and it doesn't sound like your coworkers are excited about the same things you are. it doesn't have to be that way! i hope you find a new consulting (or full time gig) that stimulates you intellectually. merry christmas and happy new year.

Ruby & Rails developer since 1.8/2.2, never heard about POODR

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