It's not only that RoR comes with a complete toolset -- it allows you to create your own libraries that extend the capabilities of the framework while keeping the developer experience terse enough through metaprogramming (compare the sample code in the README with the file acts-as-taggable-on/lib/acts-as-taggable-on/taggable.rb, where you can see how the library is opening the classes in runtime through the class_eval technique.
I'm sure something similar can be achieved in C# but not so sure about the elegance of the result.
I read through the description. Funnily enough, it's a second time I ask a question "what does Ruby have?" and the response provides something very specific to Ruby that does not idiomatically translate to other languages in a way that someone in polyglot environment would immediately understand a need for.
Statically typed languages usually have other, better ways, to associate metadata with the types, if necessary. Or avoid having such a requirement at all.
> For instance, in a social network, a user might have tags that are called skills, interests, sports, and more. There is no real way to differentiate between tags and so an implementation of this type is not possible with acts as taggable on steroids.
Isn't that's just having a property/field on a struct/class/type/object that contains the list of tags? Active Records seem to be effectively EF Core's tracked entities but with seemingly more "magic" under the hood (something that ORMs are often criticized for, including catching undeserved strays by EFC).
In general, I remain very negative towards Ruby and Ruby on Rails because most feedback that I hear leaves an impression of "so it has some of the advantages similar to top modern web frameworks in C# and Java/Kotlin but with a huge bag of breakage risk with codebase growth, a need to extensively cover code with tests and static analysis to cover for mistakes that are impossible in statically typed languages, and one tenth of performance on a sunny day".
Now, I don't think it's a bad choice in a vacuum, but it's important to consider the overall experience and practices used in a language A vs B, and whether either is used correctly.
As someone who started his career writing Ruby (but has since migrated to statically typed languages), I agree with your criticism. One big problem I had with the Rails community was the overemphasis on libraries/frameworks that make the code superficially look nice ("just put this dependency in your Gemfile, and it will automagically work") but aren't actually well-designed enough to be composable. The moment you're gonna have to do something out of the happy path, you're often out of luck.
The tagging problem in particular isn't such a hard problem that you' should need to pull in an extra dependency just for that. It's basically just a nested set of hash maps, the "hardest" part about it is the persistence - and I do believe it's worth spending maybe 2 hours on a proper DB schema in exchange for having code you own and understand.
There are other libraries in the Ruby ecosystem that take different approaches (dry.rb for example, which IMHO, strikes a better balance between the expressivity of Ruby and solid design), but they're not all that popular.
> Isn't that's just having a property/field on a struct/class/type/object that contains the list of tags?
I have never used the library, but it seems you get a lot more with just 2-3 lines of configuration (e.g. for a tag context named „interests“):
- The ability to find the n most or least used tags with a single method call
- The ability to track which user tagged a record
- The ability to find records with the same tags
- Calculation of tag statistics for a tag cloud
Now, all that would certainly be possible with EF. But many libraries for Rails give developers a very simple way to configure a feature, and deliver very expressive methods to use the feature. Which is an important property imo, since it often makes obvious what the code does, even for newcomers.
This is probably an effect from Ruby itself, where the standard library is quite expansive and has many often-used patterns built in. For example, calculating an arrays maximum value is just
arr = [1,2,3,4]
arr.max
Meanwhile, in JS:
arr = [1,2,3,4]
let max = arr[0];
for (let i = 1; i < arr.length; i++) {
if (arr[i] > max) max = arr[i];
}
And to address the README of the above library: I think it is a bit confusing because it starts with a comparison with another library, expecting readers to already know how tagging worked there.
I think what parent said is referring to stuff like
https://github.com/mbleigh/acts-as-taggable-on
It's not only that RoR comes with a complete toolset -- it allows you to create your own libraries that extend the capabilities of the framework while keeping the developer experience terse enough through metaprogramming (compare the sample code in the README with the file acts-as-taggable-on/lib/acts-as-taggable-on/taggable.rb, where you can see how the library is opening the classes in runtime through the class_eval technique.
I'm sure something similar can be achieved in C# but not so sure about the elegance of the result.
I read through the description. Funnily enough, it's a second time I ask a question "what does Ruby have?" and the response provides something very specific to Ruby that does not idiomatically translate to other languages in a way that someone in polyglot environment would immediately understand a need for.
Statically typed languages usually have other, better ways, to associate metadata with the types, if necessary. Or avoid having such a requirement at all.
> For instance, in a social network, a user might have tags that are called skills, interests, sports, and more. There is no real way to differentiate between tags and so an implementation of this type is not possible with acts as taggable on steroids.
Isn't that's just having a property/field on a struct/class/type/object that contains the list of tags? Active Records seem to be effectively EF Core's tracked entities but with seemingly more "magic" under the hood (something that ORMs are often criticized for, including catching undeserved strays by EFC).
In general, I remain very negative towards Ruby and Ruby on Rails because most feedback that I hear leaves an impression of "so it has some of the advantages similar to top modern web frameworks in C# and Java/Kotlin but with a huge bag of breakage risk with codebase growth, a need to extensively cover code with tests and static analysis to cover for mistakes that are impossible in statically typed languages, and one tenth of performance on a sunny day".
Now, I don't think it's a bad choice in a vacuum, but it's important to consider the overall experience and practices used in a language A vs B, and whether either is used correctly.
As someone who started his career writing Ruby (but has since migrated to statically typed languages), I agree with your criticism. One big problem I had with the Rails community was the overemphasis on libraries/frameworks that make the code superficially look nice ("just put this dependency in your Gemfile, and it will automagically work") but aren't actually well-designed enough to be composable. The moment you're gonna have to do something out of the happy path, you're often out of luck.
The tagging problem in particular isn't such a hard problem that you' should need to pull in an extra dependency just for that. It's basically just a nested set of hash maps, the "hardest" part about it is the persistence - and I do believe it's worth spending maybe 2 hours on a proper DB schema in exchange for having code you own and understand.
There are other libraries in the Ruby ecosystem that take different approaches (dry.rb for example, which IMHO, strikes a better balance between the expressivity of Ruby and solid design), but they're not all that popular.
> Isn't that's just having a property/field on a struct/class/type/object that contains the list of tags?
I have never used the library, but it seems you get a lot more with just 2-3 lines of configuration (e.g. for a tag context named „interests“):
- The ability to find the n most or least used tags with a single method call - The ability to track which user tagged a record - The ability to find records with the same tags - Calculation of tag statistics for a tag cloud
Now, all that would certainly be possible with EF. But many libraries for Rails give developers a very simple way to configure a feature, and deliver very expressive methods to use the feature. Which is an important property imo, since it often makes obvious what the code does, even for newcomers.
This is probably an effect from Ruby itself, where the standard library is quite expansive and has many often-used patterns built in. For example, calculating an arrays maximum value is just
Meanwhile, in JS:
And to address the README of the above library: I think it is a bit confusing because it starts with a comparison with another library, expecting readers to already know how tagging worked there.
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