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Comment on Keep Ruby Weird Again [video]

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I loved this video because I got all the references.

I sit on the Ruby on Rails facebook group, and its flooded with people from India trying to learn ruby. What I find unusual is they publish tutorials when there are plenty of good sources such as Railscasts, but its like the last 10 years doesn't exist to them and they rehash tutorials.

Ruby was great before javascript frameworks. I haven't gotten around to using turbolinks but its strongly makes me question whether I should I stop using js frameworks all together and go full on into turbolinks and go back to a simpler time of rapid development.

All of sudden everything in web-development requires you to be an engineer. I think there is a large influx of Uni CS graduates running startups and the only solution in a complex solution such as React. I can use React but I can't understand from a business perceptive why you would want to quadruple your development time and create such a high bar of entry for developers.

#MakeWebDevelopmentGreatAgain #Remeber2006?Imemeber

What I find unusual is they publish tutorials when there are plenty of good sources such as Railscasts, but its like the last 10 years doesn't exist to them and they rehash tutorials.

I think it's normal. I've seen it a lot amongst people who are actively learning. It was common in the late 00s in the Ruby world, and is currently common in the JavaScript, Elixir, Rust and Go worlds. It doesn't matter if they're "rehashing" - they're writing stuff as part of the learning process, we haven't got to read it, and I can only celebrate their enthusiasm. (Plus, on some topics, it's handy to have tutorials rewritten for the latest OS and database versions, etc, anyway since things always change slightly.)

You also never quite know how a metaphor or explanation is going to land. There have been many times when I've read several explanations for things and it hasn't really clicked until I came across something that explained it in a way that really worked for me, for whatever reason. Getting more [correct] perspectives and explanations out into the ether is only good; you never know if your tutorial or blog post might be the one that makes it click for someone or not.

You're right on that point. One of the best ways to learn is to try and teach, so it's natural that people would feel compelled to try and explain what they've learned in tutorial form.

The only problem I see with this is you often have cases of the blind leading the blind, and in the case of PHP it's usually off a cliff into a sea filled with razor blades and sharks.

Ruby's got a great community and I hope it can maintain its tone and positive energy with new people joining.

One of the things Ruby needs to do is get a handle on the atrocious documentation situation. Node's community has spectacular documentation for its open source projects, and Ruby's, many being far older, actually look really sad and decrepit by comparison. This includes the Ruby core documentation which is downright terrible in terms of usability.

So we can look forward to them creating another 20 test frameworks over the next 10 years? Wonderful...

Maybe. And that would be awesome, I think, because one of them would likely be better than what we have now and worth using.

There was a good few years where you could make an entire career out of re-hashing Java blog posts from 2000-2005 with Ruby syntax and be considered on the cutting edge. I should know; my first blog post was about dependency injection in Ruby. This was especially ironic given how long Rubyists shit-talked Java all those years.

There's a few things at play here: it's true, to many people, the last ten years didn't exist! There are a ton of programmers who have less than ten years in the industry. It takes time to learn all that history. Another aspect is that teaching something you've just learned to others is a great way to solidify your knowledge of that thing. You also have https://xkcd.com/1053/

I recently spent quite a bit of time diving into Rust and modern JS and very much understand why old tutorials are treated as none existent by many learners. Half the time I found a tutorial it was outdated. But because I was new to all of it,I didn't know and needed to bang my head against the wall longer than necessary. I'd rather go with a less well written, decorative tutorial than a excellent one that might be outdated and not work anymore. If someone were to go back and at a note at the top with a timestamp staying that it's still all correct the situation at least for me would be totally different. Not sure how well that reasoning translates to Indian learners of a more stable language and eco system like Ruby.

When searching for technical things I often set the search window to the last two years. It can help a lot.

I haven't gotten around to using turbolinks but its strongly makes me question whether I should I stop using js frameworks all together and go full on into turbolinks and go back to a simpler time of rapid development.

Exactly this. It is still faster to build websites with Rails, mainly thanks to the maturity of the ecosystem, so I still use it when render-HTML-on-the-server fits the bill. And Turbolinks 5 is surprisingly snappy, here is a demo of a forums site that I've just deployed running vanilla Turbolinks 5: https://thredded.org/.

What I find unusual is they publish tutorials when there are plenty of good sources

In my experience, sometimes this is to flaunt/show-off/project their _percieved_ competence/understanding/knowledge of the said concepts. I know it sounds very dismissive and generalising, but I have witnessed this happen a lot of times. It seems like they don't even know what they don't know.

Teaching other people is a great way to learn something yourself, and a lot of times you don't really understand a concept until it's explained in a slightly different way.

I really don't see the problem with people reaching out and trying to share their skills and knowledge with other people. To teach something you don't have to be the world's foremost expert on a subject, you just need to know more than the person you are teaching.

What I find unusual is they publish tutorials when there are plenty of good sources such as Railscasts, but its like the last 10 years doesn't exist to them and they rehash tutorials.

The same thing happens with Java; Indian people tend to publish a lot of the same articles. I think we're not the target, just other people in India.

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