[LRUG] The puzzling phenomenon of the Rails dev who hardly knows Ruby

[Chris Mear]

On 6 July 2016 at 12:36, gvim <gvimrc at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I hear of this a lot - the Rails dev who hardly knows Ruby and I'm left scratching my head. How on earth can anyone become proficient in a complex framework like Rails without understanding the language it's written in?
> 
> Someone please enlighten me.

On 6 Jul 2016, at 15:15, Luke Bennellick <bennellick.luke at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I think it depends what you mean by proficient. You can become proficient at building CRUD style apps like a blog etc without much Ruby, but not much else!

Yeah, I think it’s a lot like how you can have someone who is very experienced at using Bash as their shell, maybe even using pretty esoteric interactive features of Bash and line editing, but who has never touched Bash scripting.

Similarly, you can get a lot done in Rails with ‘just’ an understanding of how to read from, write to, and manipulate a handful of common classes (Hash, Array, String, etc.), and how to define and call methods, and little else. You barely need to know anything about Ruby classes/modules, beyond the difference between a class method and an instance method.

Chris