Comment by berkes

1 year ago

> "just write better code" to avoid these pitfalls

A lot of issues in and with Rails code leans heavily on this idea. It often comes in other flavors like "You can write rails apps that perform really well" or "Its perfectly doable to write a clean easy maintainable codebase in rails".

And is apparent in the "Provide sharp knives" doctrine as "And by capable, I mean knowledgeable enough to know when and how, accordingly to their context, they should use the different and sometimes dangerous tools in the drawers."

I really dislike this approach. I don't want something that is full of foot-guns and therefore requires me to recognise them when I lack all information to do so.

I've written terrible Rails apps, exactly because it allowed me to so, and I didn't know they would become terrible, until they were. I now recognise the (design) patterns that are foot-guns, I now know the tell-tales that show me where the sharp knives are dangerously placed. But then I get dropped into a Rails codebase that has seen 20+ developers coming and going over a decade, as the 21st developer, and I see it filled with these footguns and dangerously wielded "sharp knives". Often there's a lot of history apparent from these previous devs who saw this too and fixed some of it. But the overall state is still abysmal.

Sure, it's all these devs that made it abysmal. But the ecosystem, the framework and the language allowed, and sometimes even encouraged them to make it that.