[LRUG] Your Code is My Hell

[Graham Ashton]

On 26 Aug 2011, at 08:25, Anthony Green <anthony.green at bbc.co.uk> wrote:

> These days *I* don't see as much discipline as I did back then. I see a growing body of what Mat Wynne describes as 'Mortgage Driven Development'.

The funny thing about Rails is that it doesn't require any knowledge of OO design to keep things tidy on a small project. Few Rails developers (even amongst the more experienced ones) seem to recognise the smells (e.g. controllers with far too many responsibilities, and therefore private/protected methods) when a project grows. I've never heard a Rails developer say "I think we should extract this behaviour into a separate class…"

I've put this down to them never having worked on a project where they've been forced to learn those skills, but perhaps the lack of discussion of these topics in the wider community is a bigger contributing factor.

> 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.

The Ruby community seems very fashion lead to me (and we have our own unique sense of style). How else can you explain the widespread adoption of cucumber? I don't dispute that it could be a useful communication tool in some circumstances, but it seems very strange that it should be adopted by so many projects on which the only people who read the tests are developers.

Rspec has contributed context blocks to the testing landscape, but the rest of it has added nothing to the state of the art (yet has cost a significant amount of effort). I think Rspec simply became fashionable too.

How does the change in culture you're referring to relate to trends like these?