I love Rails, but if I could go back in time and tell them to avoid one thing it would be their strict adherence to naming conventions.
I've spent more time in my career debugging the magic than I would have by simply defining explicit references.
I've spent more time in my career debugging the magic than I would have by simply defining explicit references.
Monkey paw curls. Rails probably wouldn’t have reached popularity were it not for the strict adherence to naming conventions. The Rails value prop is productivity and the ethos of “convention over configuration” is what makes that possible.
“Convention over configuration” was coined by DHH himself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_over_configuration Without it, you don’t have Rails.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obOd7WrrTWQ
There's been arguments over the years that push back to rails magic led to a new generation of explicitness. You're also correct in saying that it's part of the value prop for productivity. But there's an overhead to learning the conventions in the first place and these days there is no denying less and less people are coming to Rails and even less learning Ruby. That's just the lifecycle of software I suppose. I'm extremely grateful for the large companies with massive ruby codebases that continue to move the language and ecosystem forward.
In most cases, we're talking about trivial amount of extra code. Things like a handful of config lines at the top of a class.
I guess I’ve just drunk the koolaid - but also, there has been a lot of work to make things more predictable, e.g. zeitwerk.
GooseCollection is more meaningful than Geese (or Gooses).