Comment by iamgilesbowkett | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iamgilesbowkett | Hacker News Reader

iamgilesbowkett

I have several problems with this. The first, and most important, is here:

http://xkcd.com/927/

The second is personal, so please take it with a grain of salt. I pointed out that Yehuda's Bundler gem has an automated condescension feature; if you try to use it without saying 'source :rubygems,' it heckles you and mockingly asks you 'did you mean to say source :rubygems? if so please go back and type it in.' this is pretty anti-Rails in my opinion, insofar as Rails is about sane defaults and programmer happiness. But I raised this issue, and the only response I got was 'fuck you.'

If I've had that kind of interaction with you, and you want my money, you better have an absolutely rock-solid plan for world peace. This is something other than an absolutely rock-solid plan for world peace, I've had that kind of interaction, he's not getting my money.

Not proud of taking the conversation there, but I do at least want to be honest. I gave Ze Frank $600 on his Kickstarter, but this project isn't getting a dime from me. I had in fact been thinking of contributing some amount in that range but after a brief attempt at talking to Yehuda spent it instead on a music class I wanted to take. :-)

Anyway, another objection: I've never heard of him doing anything with Objective-C and have no idea if he's ever even used the language before.

(If you follow @jm on Twitter you know where I'm stealing a lot of these ideas from.)

Another objection goes back to the first one, the XKCD 'standards' thing, and comes from a @jm tweet as well as from an undervalued comment buried way, way, WAY the fuck down at the very bottom of this page: we already have several projects of this nature. For instance:

https://github.com/thoughtbot/laptop

http://bitnami.org/stack/rubystack

https://github.com/joshfng/railsready

So yeah. There are too many competing standards. What to do? I know! Create a new standard!

I think a much better and simpler solution is to tell people to read http://railstutorial.com/

But the best objection comes from @patmaddox on Twitter:

http://mobile.twitter.com/patmaddox/status/18513425005033472...

Step 1: make Rails hard

Step 2: ask for $25K to make Rails easy

Step 3: PROFIT

Giles, you're acting like a prima donna over what is really a minor quibble with the way Bundler works. How many people do you honestly think get hung up on a warning from Bundler that gives you clear instructions on what to do next? And I know you like to exaggerate things to make a point, but do you really think that warning was added to heckle and mock people? Because that's ridiculous.

I can tell you one thing: there are many, many people who have benefited from the fact that Bundler fixes a boatload of issues for developers and in general makes my life, and their lives, better, even if we have to type "bundle exec", which I have conveniently aliased to "be" (try it).

I'm also willing to bet that a lot of people would benefit from this project if Yehuda takes it on. I don't know if he knows Objective-C either, and I don't care. Why? Because this is a guy who knows how to produce useful software. No, it doesn't let you produce music in your browser, or program beats in Ruby. But it is useful.

Archaeopteryx was the first time I came across you in the Ruby world and I thought it was really cool when I tried it out. Then again, I didn't find it particularly useful. I find Bundler useful every day, and I'm willing to bet lots of other people would too.

I realize I'm making this personal, and I'm sure that opens up a great opportunity for you to disparage my own accomplishments, or perhaps engage in some deliberate heckling and mockery, as opposed to the mockery you mistakenly perceive in a program's error message. I'll save you some time: I suck at programming compared to Yehuda, and I'm probably not as good as you are at it either. But one thing I'm far better at than you is appreciating people for their contributions instead of behaving like a jerk. So give it a rest, it's tiresome and juvenile.

well yeah. here you are making this personal, and what I said is I'm not going to give Yehuda any money because I criticized his PROJECT and he responded with 'fuck you giles.' so he made it personal, and you're making it personal too.

I'm not saying Bundler should be destroyed and it's a thing of evil. I said it was super useful but had very aggravating flaws which indicate that Rails went off the rails. If you guys can back off from all the making things personal about me for five minutes you might actually notice that "Rails went off the rails and is no longer entirely true to its original principles" is not such a vicious thing to say.

But is "fuck you giles" a response which is going to prevent you from getting my money? Yes, of course it is.

> what I said is I'm not going to give Yehuda any money because I criticized his PROJECT and he responded with 'fuck you giles.' so he made it personal, and you're making it personal too.

Well, that's reasonable enough. I'll be honest, when I read that, I assumed it was hyperbole. If it was a literal "fuck you", well yeah, that would bother me too.

I help maintain the http://github.com/thoughtbot/laptop script that Giles mentioned. Happy to take feedback in Github Issues.

Some other good ones:

https://github.com/atmos/cinderella

https://github.com/pivotal/pivotal_workstation

I think you are missing the reason for the project.

In the php world, MAMP on osx is one of the reasons so many newbie jump into php. a simple app, abstracting away apache, php and mysql. you simply create a new vhost and click start.

This is the target audience - not the people who know how to clone a git repo and run a script in terminal.

He is trying to make it easy for new users and programmers. I know high school teachers that would use this to teach ruby web programming without all the error prone manual configuration.

Right, this would be very valuable as a teaching resource, and thus indirectly valuable to the, I believe, sizable chunk Ruby/Rails community at large who enjoy doing it as their "day job".

Bundler's "condescension" was a real error message, albeit a terse one. I expanded it 18 days ago. If you think it's still condescending, please suggest a better way of phrasing the error.

https://github.com/carlhuda/bundler/commit/abdc6374bd18488d0...

what I felt was rude was not the thing Bundler said but the thing Bundler does. if you know people are expecting rubygems to be the default, you don't tell them "oops you forgot to type rubygems, sucks to be you." you just make it the default.

you had an issue open for this on GitHub but it was closed with very little explanation. mind if I reopen it?

Joel Spolsky [1] beat XKCD to that punch by several years:

> (By the way, for those of you who follow the arcane but politically-charged world of blog syndication feed formats, you can see the same thing happening over there. RSS became fragmented with several different versions, inaccurate specs and lots of political fighting, and the attempt to clean everything up by creating yet another format called Atom has resulted in several different versions of RSS plus one version of Atom, inaccurate specs and lots of political fighting. When you try to unify two opposing forces by creating a third alternative, you just end up with three opposing forces. You haven't unified anything and you haven't really fixed anything.)

[1]: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

Do you mind going into some details about why the Bundler gem was mocking you? I'm a Python dev and only know rudimentary rails/ruby.

In your Gemfile Bundler requires you to tell it where to lookup for gems. For 99.99% of people that is going to be rubygems.org, but it doesn't have to be. There has been talk about making this the default and then allowing someone to turn it off.

edit: The RubyRouges podcast has a great episode with the maintainer of Bundler where a lot of the difficulties with Bundler are discussed in depth. That's the "talk" I was referring too.

well, this is what's insane about Rails these days. we have a value which is correct in 99.99% of the cases, and we are (at best) debating whether or not to make it the default.

I say at best because obviously in my case I did not see a whole lot of debate. the GitHub issue for it is likewise extremely not-discussion-y. wherever the discussion for this incredibly controversial idea is taking place, I haven't seen it.

actually I hate to say it but one of the early (2006? 2005?) blog posts about the diff between Python and Ruby was that in Python's console, if you hit "q" or escape or ctrl-C or something, you get an error message like the 'source :rubygems' error message, which says "hit ctrl-D to escape." the blog post was saying this is basically the diff between the two languages, that Python would correct you if it knew what you wanted but you asked it the wrong way, whereas Ruby would just either support the most obvious option, or support both the most obvious option and the 'correct' option as well.

the idea in Ruby, and especially in Rails, is that if you know what the default is which most people are going to expect or try, you should support it. to say "we know you thought source :rubygems was the default, but it's not, you have to type it explicitly" is a little un-Ruby and a whole bunch un-Rails.

> in Python's console, if you hit "q" or escape or ctrl-C or something, you get an error message like the 'source :rubygems' error message, which says "hit ctrl-D to escape."

Ah, I think I know what you're talking about. I wasn't using Python back then, and I know exit() was added after that (the only way to leave the console before that was to Ctrl-D), but when you type "exit" in the console, Python responds:

    Use exit() or Ctrl-D (i.e. EOF) to exit

This bugs countless Python devs, myself included. It wouldn't be so bad if the console had no idea what "exit" was and responded with a NameError, but the fact that it realizes what you were trying to do but tells you to do something else inconsequentially different is a minor annoyance.

Anyone ever hit up Linus to add the 'git statsu' command? That would really help me out.

You can create an alias for it:

git config –-global alias.statsu status

I have mine aliased to 'st'.

I'm assuming this is a (weak) joke, but in case you're genuinely wondering:

    git config --global alias.statsu status

This seemed a little odd to me as well, but mostly because I haven't been a noob for a long time and so am out of touch with that feeling of "this is hard" when it comes to installing rails.

I don't think that installing rails got any harder relative to where it was in the 1.0 days. vanilla rails locked to one version with globally-installed gems is just as easy as it ever was, so I don't know if its quite fair to say step one is "make rails hard"; the current state of the ruby world is a lot more enterprise-ready and that comes at a complexity cost and automating that away is inconvenient.

entirely fair, no, entirely funny, yes.

It's fine Giles, most are pledging for the sticker anyway ;)

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