The Ruby Stdlib is not a Ghetto
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Many people today still grow up in "The Ghetto," which is a place of geographic, economic, and political marginalization. Before you go talking about "Wii is a ghetto" or "Ruby is a ghetto" you should really understand something about what that means, and who you might be affecting with your words.
And even if you've decided that you want to throw the word around, use it fucking properly. A ghetto is not just something that "sucks". Ghettos are defined not just by being run-down, but by being isolated in some way. If you want to say something sucks, just say it sucks.
People also need to be a little more careful about using the word "sucks". It has a long history of homophobic connotations--originally it was used to denigrate people, generally men, by suggesting (in a derogatory sense) that they performed certain homosexual acts.
(When I was a kid, something that was really cheap and crappy was "ghetto"--"ghetto" being an adjective. Like if you had a really crappy car from the 80's, your car was ghetto. So maybe, even if the Ruby stdlib isn't a ghetto, the Ruby stdlib is still pretty ghetto in the adjective sense.)
And I think "ghetto" as an adjective is even more offensive. It basically means "black". As in, "Ruby stdlib is crappy... like things black people use".
It's arguing something like: you can get some things done in PHP, but it's this walled-in, limiting environment that you'll never flourish in, unless you find a way to escape it and break out of the "PHP programmer" box. It even comes with a bit of a cultural/economic walling in also, with the connotations of the "PHP programmer" label.
With language/library environments there seems to at least be the potential for that sort of metaphorical isolation and limitation. I've heard people worry about whether there's a "Lisp ghetto" in that sense, especially post-1990s. That said, I agree that for this particular series of two posts, it doesn't seem to add much. It's something more like, "the Ruby stdlib is bad / no it isn't".
Why Zed titled his post as such was partially an accident (he didn't mean to publish it in the state it had been originally published, with that title). Why he originally titled it that, i dunno.
Has "it sucks" always meant that something was bad? No, but that's what it means now because that's how people started using it.
In this particular case, although plenty of people use "is a ghetto" to mean "sucks" rather than "is isolated," and although almost everyone uses "sucks" to mean "is poor" rather than "performs fellatio," I personally think that "is a ghetto" is a strong metaphor when used to imply a marginalized, isolated technology and is incredibly weak when used to imply something has fallen into disrepair. It really doesn't add anything insightful.
Which brings me to my personal metric for deciding how well a metaphor fits. Does it add some insight? If "is a ghetto" is synonymous with "sucks," I gain nothing form using it other than passing myself off as a hipster.
But when someone uses "is a ghetto" to describe something with an insular culture, I get an "aha!" moment as I think about the various implications, such as people trying to live their entire lives within the ghetto, or people learning to speak a crazy creole of their programming languages.
I think using "is a ghetto" in the social sense conveys extra insight or meaning, so I personally prefer it.
I will go further. Using it to merely suggest that something sucks is--well--gay.
How do you ruby people find the good libraries when you need to perform a task? Is it all word-of-mouth (word-of-blog I guess)?
Should "rack" be called standard-http-server-api-with-support-for-middleware, and then "unicorn" be called pre-forking-web-server-using-standard-http-server-api-with-support-for-middleware?
No, but perhaps we could have:
WebServer = require_any_satisfying_protocol 'http-server/with-middleware-support'
WebServer.new
{Mongrel::HttpServer => ['http-server', 'http-server/with-middleware-support']}1. In practice you almost never want to load a random library that says it supports a certain interface, you will want a specific library. Notable exceptions are glibc where the interfaces are well-defined over several decades but that brings us to...
2. Few libraries implement the same exact interface. Mongrel and Unicorn have totally different interfaces. Phusion Passenger is also a web server but works in a fundamentally different way from either of them. Hpricot and Nokogiri are both XML parsers but their usage API is different.
class Mongrel::HttpServer
class HttpServerProtocolAdapter < Gem::ProtocolAdapter
implements 'http-server'
implements 'http-server/with-middleware-support'
...
{'http-server' => Mongrel::HttpServer::HttpServerProtocolAdapter,
'http-server/with-middleware-support' => Mongrel::HttpServer::HttpServerProtocolAdapter,
...}
Of course, if you had a class that matched the protocol exactly, you could just use something like
class Mongrel::HttpServer
supports_protocol 'http-server'
end
This is all assuming that we don't actually want our protocols to be modules or classes or something else that we have to include in the adapter somehow (because this is Ruby, and we do well without needing IDuck.) Instead, protocols would just be externally specified things, with their name-strings perhaps being the URIs of standards docs. At most, if a Gem::Protocol was a reified type, it would be a unit test suite to determine whether a ProtocolAdapter actually supported its protocol (minimally, via a series of #respond_to?s.)
As an example, their proposed HTTP interface can be found here:
Java is, of course, one place where this is a bit better. log4j and jUnit both tell you what they do quite easily. (But then again, Apache Maven does not.)
We have Google these days, and if that doesn't help you, go on the #ruby IRC channel and ask what they recommend.
awk -> I forget what
grep -> global/regular expression/print
sed -> stream editor
perl -> I'll give you this one
cat -> concatenate
finger -> I'll give you this one
man -> manual
Nokogiri is the 5th result for me. How does anyone find libraries and then choose between them? I believe you should always do a little research unless your feeling lucky.
$ gem install rack-cache
$ irb
irb(main):001:0> require 'rack/cache'
=> true
irb(main):002:0> Rack::Cache
=> Rack::Cache
Humans brains are by nature powerful association engines. People tend to associate brand names with their purpose and (perceived) quality pretty quickly. If you've heard of that a once and the product turns out to be good then you are likely to remember it in the future. Why do you think Coca Cola is called Coca Cola and not Black Sweet Beverage? Heineken instead of Dutch Beer? Nike instead of Expensive Nice Shoes? Names do not have to be descriptive.
It confuses people for maybe a few minutes. Then they look for information, find it, and they move on. There's absolutely no point giving products generic names because in the long run it hurts the authors by being unable to differentiate themselves from others who do the same thing.
Don't know what "nokogiri" is? Search the internet and the first result will tell you. Looking for an XML parser but don't know its name? Search the internet and the first result likely gives a good recommendation.
I didn't read the article in great detail, but I noticed this:
it provides many ways to do the same thing for programmer convenience
I do, however, find it peculiar that utilities like RSS, FTP and mail handling are included in a stdlib.
This is extremely common, and not at all unique to Ruby. For example, providing defaults for parameters is perhaps the most common and simplest form of this.
Whenever a library is used by wildly different clients, there is a good chance the API it chooses will be better suited to one or the other. The same Net::HTTP is presumably used for the simplest of uses, maybe 5 line download scripts, and the most complex of cases, perhaps forwarding http requests with all headers intact.
In general I go by "minimal, but complete"; but for widely used libraries that have clients of very different complexities, it makes sense to provide a simple API for convenience. I'd rather not be specifying the client headers, user agent, supported encodings, etc, etc each time I want to fetch a file over http.
require 'open-uri'
response = open("http://blog.segment7.net/").read Net::HTTP.new(host, port).start do |http|
post = Net::HTTP::Post.new(url)
post.set_form_data('blah' => '123')
http.request(post)
end response = Net::HTTP.post_form(URI.parse("http://example.com"), {:param => "val"})Which of course is not a counter argument at all.
IMO the Ruby stdlib is a mess. Denying it won't improve it.