Why Ruby & Rails Needs Enterprise and Regulations
During the Pragmatic Studio I attended, a subject came up where I voiced concern over the fact that Ruby allows the programmer to override behaviors of “core” components. Dave Thomas explained that the other language designers assume that people are idiots and that’s why they put all the constraints. Although I disagree, I do love the fact that Ruby gives me a great deal of power.
I fell in love with Rails when I saw that Rails lowers the barrier to entry in web application development. What I didn’t realize at the time was that when you put out goodies in the wild, you tend to attract lots of wild animals. I’m finding out that convention over configuration can be abused to a point where I’m constantly trying to look for convention that once existed since Ruby allows you to smash convention.
I’m now accepting the fact that I’ll always be hired to solve problems. That means just about all my projects will be unscalable, full of technical debt, and design dead codes. Considering how young the language and the framework is, I find it somewhat shocking that so many projects are design dead at such early stage.
Now that I think about it, Rails is popular among startups where they have to constantly put up screens to impress investors and change business model. I accept that this is the nature of the beast. Until the time when Rails is used for any enterprise system or any app that is under regulatory constraints, this will remain to be the fact.
Let’s face it, putting out well-tested quality code requires lot more time and effort than just throwing shit on the wall and see what sticks. We all give lip services to TDD or BDD, but when you have a deadline to an investor who wants to see something moving next couple of hours will not allow you to dick around with the quality. Something always gives.
Is this only limited to startups? Absolutely not! However, it is more likely that any enterprise system will be better planned and properly resourced. Sun spent ton of money to get people to follow standards because I remember in early days of Java when this was happening as well.
So, next time you hear a young Railer trashing “enterprise”, please tell him to stop.
