Why I Hate Rails - After six months you’ll be lucky if you have this

I dropped out of college, too. I like to say I ran out of money, and I did to an extent, but I could have made it work. Truth be told I just didn't like it.

Nine months ago, a friend of mine suggested that I consider Rails for a new project I was thinking about. I had never even heard of Rails (remember, this was nine months ago), but I gave it a shot anyway. I started working on my app on Friday night after work, and I followed Michael Hartl's tutorial as a starting point. I had a general idea of the MVC pattern so I was good there, but up until that weekend I'd never written any kind of code other than C#. By Sunday night I had an MVP for my niche ERP that I'd been wanting to build. By the end of that month I'd fleshed it out and sold a license for $$$ to a company in my niche. I've been maintaining it ever since, I've worked as a contractor on Rails projects, and I'm happy.

I'm not special. I'm not some kind of super-programmer. I couldn't even pass college-level calc. I don't want to sound like an ass, killahpriest, but I learned Rails "in a weekend" because I didn't blame my tools for my shortcomings. I didn't just follow instructions; I did my best to understand the steps I was taking. Learning new technologies is like reading books. They all have certain things in common, and if you learn those commonalities, you can pretty much breeze through just about anything. I suppose that's what they try to teach in computer science departments...

I find it interesting to see how many new developers, and perhaps problematically teachers of new developers, set out to learn programming via web development in Rails. I like Rails. Rails enables developers to solve a common class of problems efficiently and productively. There's tremendous demand for developers who can be productive using Rails. Those are all good reasons to learn the language and framework but if I had to go back and learn to program again I wonder if I would have been successful or enjoyed starting with Rails and Ruby.

Providing a beginner friendly environment and introduction to programming was never one of the motivations behind Rails. If that's a role it can play well then that is all the better. I want tools to exist which help more people learn to program and which give them the satisfaction of being able to build useful applications quickly. However I think it unfair to take a framework which set out to make reasonable decisions about a fairly well defined class of problems in order to make experienced developers more productive in that domain and blame it for being a poor platform to learn programming on.

When is it fair to "hate Rails" and when should we being saying "wow, I guess there is a lot to learn about building software"?

I am a front end web developer. I mostly don't care what is going in backend and I just call the API endpoint to get my JSON blob.

Recently I interested in learning a bit of backend programming. I did start learning Node.js and Rails together.

I hate Rails too. All Rails tutorials and guides are like reader knows everything they know. I feel it was easier before but now there is so much you need to learn to make a real world Rails app. Sure that Twitter clone is easy. But it gets hard when you want to make a bunch of "gems" work together. You need to know a lot of history of Rails in order to get it.

I liked Node.js over Rails not because I know JavaScript better than Ruby, I never had problems writing or reading Ruby code. It's a beautiful language. The reason I love Node is that I know what is going on. There is not much unnecessary magic.

I know it's not fair to compare a "framework" with a "whatever-we-call-node-js". But Node my points are:

- Rails itself is very skinny that can't do much without gems

- By adding multiple gems to make the framework usable you get into truble of making them work together.

So if Rails wants to solve all my problems it should include all functionalities I (usually) want or if it tries to be skinny and light it should be like Node.js

Possibly the dumbest thing I've seen on Hacker News. Is this what this site has come to?

You could exchange Rails for any technology stack you don't currently know and generate this same rant.

I've just completed BerkeleyX CS169.1x (Software as a Service)[1] that teaches Rails and I haven't found it to be painful at all. I'm sure that I'm no expert, but I am competent enough to be building a Rails app of my own that utilizes most of the concepts in the OP. The best way to learn it (IMHO) is to just jump in and do a project, learning as you go. I can see how learning web development from scratch with Rails could be challenging, but that could be said for any web stack.

[1] https://www.edx.org/courses/BerkeleyX/CS169.1x/2013_Spring/s...

I started reading the article and gave up after a bit.

If Gates, Zuck, and everyone are pushing to have programming in grade schools, I fear more articles that are similar.

We all have our strengths and weaknesses. Some of us can wander into a new language, start making a mess but at the end of the day something works. Others, wander into a language, look around, try and slap something together and then blog about how things don't make sense. Put me in a garage with a disassembled motor? I'll be lost, open a book, but I won't blog about it...

At this point you're probably asking what's the point of this comment? I felt the same about the blog. A waste of time.

Seriously funny rant. I don't use Rails since I do mobile stuff now but I once wrote a rant about PHP and wound up liking it later. But PHP is trivial to get into and Ruby/Rails is not.

I'm particularly sympathetic to the discussion of gems / rvm. Every non-trivial ruby project I've worked on has started with at least a tour of the outer circles of dependency hell, and I bailed on at least one Rails project partly because I couldn't get the environment up on my machine after two weeks of effort.

I really like Ruby the language. Not so sure about the ecosystem of modules, tools, and frameworks, but maybe that part gets better after you put in a few years.

The problem here is stated in your first sentence: "I'm not a programmer."

A lot, if not all of this, just kind of "clicks" if you've already worked with something similar in some shape or form in the past.

Things I'd mark off your list as it isn't Rails specific (You came from PHP, right? None of this should be new if you've built a modern web app):

- HTML

- CSS

- Javascript/JQuery

Things I'd mark off your list as it's Ruby specific (PHP was built for the web, but you can run things in isolation if you want. You want to learn Rails, need to learn Ruby - It's just modular in this setup.):

- Ruby

- ERB Syntax (It's just Ruby inside an HTML file wrapped in <% %>, there's nothing really special here)

- Gem Management (gem install my_gem isn't hard and is second nature for anyone who knows Ruby)

- Bundler (Make a Gemfile, type gem 'my_gem' - Done)

Things that are left:

- Rails Philosophy

- Rails Commands

- ActiveRecord

- Rake (Not Rails specific - Just you there are rails specific tasks)

- Routing

- Deployment

Those 6 (5 if you don't count Rake as it's pretty common in a lot of Ruby projects) can be knocked out in the first few chapters of Agile Web Development with Rails(http://pragprog.com/book/rails4/agile-web-development-with-r...). Some things will take practice before getting used to, but for the most part things should be making sense after playing around with it for a few days.

I think the issue here is you're jumping into RoR without a lot of background knowledge that is there for anyone who has dealt with something similar. You're tackling a lot of different things at once so it's overwhelming. Learn things in steps and you'll be all set, don't bite off more than you can chew. Good luck!

Learning Rails now is the equivalent of starting to watch Coronation Street (British Soap) last week (The show has been running since 1960).

I agree that it is incredibly difficult to get up and running on Rails. Efforts are under way to get one click installs working so that you can get working in no time at all but these all take time and money to develop.

Just because a software engineer completed a college course does not mean they have finished learning, they're just beginning. That's why I love this profession, there is always something else to learn and apply.

Stick at it, you've learned a lot, BUT there's ALWAYS going to be a lot more to learn no matter the domain.

Ooh ooh, now write a rant on boiling water being too hot and the price of fuel... If you're comparing Rails to PHP you're doing it wrong. And who seriously builds a Rails app without an understanding of basic CSS and HTML? A few parts seemed to be just thrown in there to pad out the rant if you ask me.

I agree that the whole premise of Gems is frustrating and deploying isn't as straight-forward as FTP'ing a folder of PHP files. This is where services like Heroku come in very handy but then that's another problem: relying on a 3rd party service to simplify deploying a Rails app.

Disclaimer: I'm a PHP developer.

I'm not sure which is worse, that people read this and upvoted it, or that they didn't read it and upvoted it.

Disclaimer: not a Rails dev or even a fan, but still the Rails hate is going a little overboard.

I think this is a good place to bring up the law of conservation of complexity. Every task has a certain amount of inherent complexity and, short of some revelation or major step forward, you can't get around that.

Gem management, ActiveRecord, SQL, rake, ERB syntax--these are just some of the ways in which that complexity is manifested in the Rails stack. Any sort of large community-maintained and developed web stack is going to have these same pieces of complexity, possibly in different forms.

At the end of the day, Rails is just as complex as any other stack if you try to understand it completely.

The difference is that Rails makes it easy to get started without understanding everything. In my experience over the last 6 months, I was able to make useful stuff before I fully understood everything. I've continued to learn as I needed and it's been fine.

This is ridiculous. If you just want to learn "Rails", you've already lost. Your goal should be learning how to build things with software, not learning one facet of building a web application. If getting Rails setup and installed is too frustrating, maybe software development isn't for you.

I too have experienced frustration at a lot of what the author gripes about here. Most of them aren't specific to Rails, but there's enough that are to make it overwhelming for newcomers. The barrier to entry has become rather high.

This just highlights the switching costs/learning curve of picking up a new stack. Plug in the name of any stack and it holds true. My approach - pick one and ship.

OK, it seems hard at first, but all you got to do is watch a bunch of recent railscasts that seems interesting to you and you'll be up to speed in no time.

If you don't know html, css, and javascript and you want to write a web application... you're going to have a bad time.

I was going to suggest PHP/MySQL but a similar argument applies.

Those gems sound cool by the way - any analogs in PHP?

Sounds like he's ranting about the difference between using Rails and really mastering Rails.

Thank you for this, you are absolutely right. I've had to watch a coworker (who's new to Rails) struggle through this same bullshit. After the 5 days it took him to set it up and run our Rails app locally, I showed him Smalltalk's Seaside and how it takes a minute and a half from downloading to having it work, so that at least he would have some perspective of how so far off the Rails experience is from what it could be.

Please keep this up at least until I get to the office tomorrow so I can send him the link. :)

Has it been that long since an anti-Rails rant?

Just sounds like another one of "Kakubei's Rants."

Totally the opposite of my experience.

It's not entirely clear what other programming experience this person had before learning Rails but Rails is definitely not the place to start learning programming. It also doesn't sound like he was following any specific tutorial. For any readers wanting to learn Rails, I would highly recommend http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book. If he didn't have a well structured tutorial to follow and no prior programming knowledge then it doesn't surprise me that he wound up confused and frustrated after 6 months.

    * They tell you you don’t have to learn anything else except Rails, that this is one of the greatest advantages it has.

Every single introductory book or blog post to Rails I have read says something like "While knowing Ruby completely isn't a prerequisite to Rails, here's the minimum to get going and you should teach yourself the rest as you go".

    * Oh, but you do know about MVC right? The whole Model, View Controller philosophy? Right?

Not sure why having a design pattern is such a problem. I'd say it makes things easier after learning it.

    * Sure, it’s awesome, once you get the hang of how to install and maintain your gems. Is that hard?

If you're diving into rubygems and adding a bunch just to see what happens then you will probably run into trouble. I have followed the Agile Rails and railstutorial.org tutorials and never got into gem trouble there.

    * Yeah, good luck, first you have to install [rbenv] it with Homebrew

Homebrew is so awesome, especially for beginners. 5 minutes Googling and half an hour should give you enough knowledge to know how to install rbenv (brew install rbenv && brew install ruby-build)

I'll skip the rest of the technology rants as it's more of the same.

    I might as well get a PHD in aerospace engineering instead of learning all this shit just to create a few web pages.

I dare say that aerospace engineering involves a few more literal moving parts than a Rails application.

    You can take comfort in the fact that creating a Rails app is nowhere near as bad as deploying one.

This was written on 8th May 2012. The author lists off all of the technologies Rails requires you understand but amongst all of his research had never heard of Heroku?

There are a lot of moving parts in Rails because it does a lot of things. The author is right that there is a lot to learn in Rails but it's not clear what he's comparing it against. If he wants to make websites with iWeb and work at that level of complexity then I'm happy for him. However this rant reads more like a 5 year old complaining after he tried to drive a car and hadn't learnt how to ride a bike yet.

You're whining pussy. Learning any web application framework involves.... sorry for saying that... learning.