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Comment by rsbrown | Hacker News Reader

Finally. As "opinionated software", the success of Rails depends on neatly slotting into the well-worn groove of best practices adopted by its user base. Like it or not, jQuery has filled that role nicely for client-side javascript for quite a while now.

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Rails is opinionated software, but it isn't the opinions of its userbase; It is the opinions of DHH. If DHH/37 Signals isn't using it, it probably isn't going to make in to Rails core. I am not saying that this is a bad thing. Having the defaults based on a profitable, stable web app with millions of users isn't the worst idea.

> If DHH/37 Signals isn't using it, it probably isn't going to make in to Rails core. I am not saying that this is a bad thing.

That jQuery made it into Rails shows that it's not just DHH's app skeleton anymore; it remains to be seen if ActiveSupport will ever quit being DHH's junk drawer[1] though.

[1]: https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/activesupport/lib...

That was introduced by this guy: https://github.com/jeremy

Don't know that I understand what he means by accessing "the reddit", though.

It was added as a joke in response to the controversy on reddit about the original commit.

A while ago a 15-20 line patch was committed, which added the methods Array#second, Array#third, etc. These methods were added as syntactic sugar, in order to complement the built-in Array#first. What followed was a huge uproar on Reddit; people called the patch "bloat", claimed that Rails is growing into an uncontrollably large monster, etc. The uproar was not unlike the recent uproar about Coffeescript in size. DHH made fun of that by adding Array#forty_two.

So before every Rails release DHH should conduct a public poll? And what level of abstraction it should be? "Which JS framework should be made default" or "Should we have a default JS framework"? As you can see, it quickly becomes a mess. Opinions bring sanity.

I think you may have misread my comment. I was saying that it isn't necessarily a bad thing.

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