[LRUG] Your Code is My Hell

Daniel Barlow dan at telent.net
Fri Aug 26 02:44:49 PDT 2011


On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 8:25 AM, Anthony Green <anthony.green at bbc.co.uk> wrote:
> A couple of years ago I postulated that Ruby's biggest challenge was going
> to be growing the community whilst retaining it's culture.
>
> I don't think we're doing a very good job of it.

If I might be permitted to snark for a minute ...  I started doing
Ruby properly about 18 months ago but my observation from that time is
that one would be mistaken either to consider the Ruby culture as
homogenous, or to conflate it with "test first" culture, and the
further one delves into the core (and thus older) code or looks around
to see what's happening outside the Rails ecosystem, the more true
this is.  The developers who are flitting from test-unit to rspec to
shoulda and arguing about what kind of test doubles to use, are not
the developers who are working on e.g. rubygems or RMagick or webrick
or the rest of the core library[*] - or if they are, they are applying
quite different development standards to these older codebases.  And
when did you last hear anyone say "MINASWAN"?

(This email is intended as a cultural observation and does not express
or imply a position on the merits of testing nor on the quality of
Ruby's code or its developers.  I'm very happy working in Ruby, I
think that on the whole it's at least as well designed as any other
competing platform, and I don't want anyone to assume that my moment's
snarkiness was an indicator of general dissatisfaction, because it's
not)

[*] I exclude the RubySpec effort from this, and I admire what those
guys are doing greatly, but even then that's clearly about writing
spec to document existing behaviour for alternative ruby interpreters,
rather than writing the spec first that MRI will implement



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