While I'm interested in this (on a similar note, heroku's postgres app has been great for me), it seems like having to install and manage Rails is an important thing for new people to learn.
This is especially true if one wishes to push code to production and so on--even with when using Heroku, one still needs to understand the command line side of all of this.
It seems like having to install multiple different versions of Ruby/Rails is an important thing for a new person to learn, but we have RVM.
It seems like getting a rails app deployed on a server is an important thing for a new person to learn, yet we have Heroku which takes little effort.
We can say this about many of the things ruby/rails and the community has abstracted away for us, but that doesn't mean these tools aren't important in moving forward as a community.
I'm no slouch as a developer. Yet when I've installed RVM on 5+ systems, something _always_ goes wrong, and never in the same way. When it works it works great, but when it doesn't you spend your day bashing your head into a wall.
How will we encourage new programmers to join Rails and the Ruby community when they fail to even get it running?
I get what you're saying, but the thing is that it's really not difficult to get running. Especially on a Mac. Especially now that we have bundler and such. The only thing one really has to manage is ruby versions, and that can be done with rbenv/rvm.
But doing everything in an app really does have the possibility of hurting one's ability to put code into production, even with heroku.
> I get what you're saying, but the thing is that it's really not difficult to get running. Especially on a Mac. Especially now that we have bundler and such. The only thing one really has to manage is ruby versions, and that can be done with rbenv/rvm.
I'm not interested in Rails.app, but I must correct you on that: it isn't difficult to get a Ruby environment running in most cases.
When you've spent half a day puzzling over why your colleague's new Macbook Air won't build Ruby despite everything seeming to be in order you'll never be so sure of how long setting it up will take.
Yeah, I was wondering the same thing. Rails, on a relatively clean system, is so easy to install through the command line that if you can't do that work...then you may not be the kind of person who can easily debug a basic Rails app in the first place...Not trying to be elitist here, as I'm the kind of person who runs homebrew scripts without reading the actual scripts. Just saying that if you can't even do that, then all the post-installation work of Rails is going to be a painful slog.
A significant portion of the Rails ecosystem -- who we should encourage -- is people coming into web development from a background which doesn't include an engineering degree or years of command line experience. For example, many of them are designers or folks who've otherwise built web pages, for whom <h1><%= @post.header %></h1> is an awesome step forward in terms of their ability to deliver software which solves actual problems.
Eventually, a few years from now, they'll have a better understanding of the full stack, but for now, we want to clear as many possible roadblocks from their way so that they don't either abandon web development or begin using Programming languages which are reasonably Hospitable to People who come from non-traditional backgrounds.
Technologies require mindshare - Tokaido is software conversion optimisation for Rails.
Also "relatively clean system" is an important qualifier. A lot of curious developers won't have one of those, and instead will have to deal with dependency hell and tedious gotchas.
Jumping into learning about the framework is better use of their time upfront.
Having spent a morning this week showing journalism students at Mizzou how to install Django, I would very much like the ability to say "oh you want to try rails? Just download Postgres.app and Tokaido.app and you're set."
Also, this is a weird conversation to be having with a dude who has a book for teaching beginners Ruby (http://ruby.bastardsbook.com/ )!
Ha! I'm all about teaching beginners how to use Ruby, which is painful in itself. By the time they get to Rails, they had better be used to typing in commands at a text prompt :)
No seriously, though...So many things can easily go wrong with basic Rails...not because Rails is bad, but because Rails has so many features...that if people haven't mastered the art of Googling lines from debug-output or command-line install instructions...then the time they've "saved" by having a push-button solution will be more than spent in the time trying to get off the ground.
But I'm obviously speaking from hindsight...as I've gotten more experienced, I've seen that writing script for minimal apps is more efficient than launching a full-fledged Rails app. However, I may have lost interest in the whole web-app game long ago if I didn't have the chance to play around (clumsily) with Rails 2.2
Comments
While I'm interested in this (on a similar note, heroku's postgres app has been great for me), it seems like having to install and manage Rails is an important thing for new people to learn.
This is especially true if one wishes to push code to production and so on--even with when using Heroku, one still needs to understand the command line side of all of this.
It's also pretty easy to do these days.
It seems like having to install multiple different versions of Ruby/Rails is an important thing for a new person to learn, but we have RVM.
It seems like getting a rails app deployed on a server is an important thing for a new person to learn, yet we have Heroku which takes little effort.
We can say this about many of the things ruby/rails and the community has abstracted away for us, but that doesn't mean these tools aren't important in moving forward as a community.
I'm no slouch as a developer. Yet when I've installed RVM on 5+ systems, something _always_ goes wrong, and never in the same way. When it works it works great, but when it doesn't you spend your day bashing your head into a wall.
How will we encourage new programmers to join Rails and the Ruby community when they fail to even get it running?
I get what you're saying, but the thing is that it's really not difficult to get running. Especially on a Mac. Especially now that we have bundler and such. The only thing one really has to manage is ruby versions, and that can be done with rbenv/rvm.
But doing everything in an app really does have the possibility of hurting one's ability to put code into production, even with heroku.
> I get what you're saying, but the thing is that it's really not difficult to get running. Especially on a Mac. Especially now that we have bundler and such. The only thing one really has to manage is ruby versions, and that can be done with rbenv/rvm.
I'm not interested in Rails.app, but I must correct you on that: it isn't difficult to get a Ruby environment running in most cases.
When you've spent half a day puzzling over why your colleague's new Macbook Air won't build Ruby despite everything seeming to be in order you'll never be so sure of how long setting it up will take.
Yeah, I was wondering the same thing. Rails, on a relatively clean system, is so easy to install through the command line that if you can't do that work...then you may not be the kind of person who can easily debug a basic Rails app in the first place...Not trying to be elitist here, as I'm the kind of person who runs homebrew scripts without reading the actual scripts. Just saying that if you can't even do that, then all the post-installation work of Rails is going to be a painful slog.
A significant portion of the Rails ecosystem -- who we should encourage -- is people coming into web development from a background which doesn't include an engineering degree or years of command line experience. For example, many of them are designers or folks who've otherwise built web pages, for whom <h1><%= @post.header %></h1> is an awesome step forward in terms of their ability to deliver software which solves actual problems.
Eventually, a few years from now, they'll have a better understanding of the full stack, but for now, we want to clear as many possible roadblocks from their way so that they don't either abandon web development or begin using Programming languages which are reasonably Hospitable to People who come from non-traditional backgrounds.
Technologies require mindshare - Tokaido is software conversion optimisation for Rails.
Also "relatively clean system" is an important qualifier. A lot of curious developers won't have one of those, and instead will have to deal with dependency hell and tedious gotchas.
Jumping into learning about the framework is better use of their time upfront.
Having spent a morning this week showing journalism students at Mizzou how to install Django, I would very much like the ability to say "oh you want to try rails? Just download Postgres.app and Tokaido.app and you're set."
Also, this is a weird conversation to be having with a dude who has a book for teaching beginners Ruby (http://ruby.bastardsbook.com/ )!
Ha! I'm all about teaching beginners how to use Ruby, which is painful in itself. By the time they get to Rails, they had better be used to typing in commands at a text prompt :)
No seriously, though...So many things can easily go wrong with basic Rails...not because Rails is bad, but because Rails has so many features...that if people haven't mastered the art of Googling lines from debug-output or command-line install instructions...then the time they've "saved" by having a push-button solution will be more than spent in the time trying to get off the ground.
But I'm obviously speaking from hindsight...as I've gotten more experienced, I've seen that writing script for minimal apps is more efficient than launching a full-fledged Rails app. However, I may have lost interest in the whole web-app game long ago if I didn't have the chance to play around (clumsily) with Rails 2.2
yes, but once you depend on native extensions it's suddenly not as trivial anymore.
which is why i had stage file with gentoo prefix instead of all the other stuff, while i was still fulltime osx
http://reza.jelveh.me/2009/05/20/gentoo-on-os-x
i'd be surprised if that stage still works though.