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This would be my Rails Rant of the Day

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Okay, I know that using rails is supposed to make one's life easier. I recognize that convention over code rules the rails mindset. I even completely agree that rails devs don't feel pain when they develop applications, with all the various pieces kindly hidden from them. That is great. Good for them / us / me.

But, come on, this?

No, not "come on." More like, "COME THE FUCK ON, WHAT THE FUCKING HELL?"

At this point, you are so fucking far from the bare metal of what the hell is going on that you might as well say you aren't programming. This kind of shit isn't programming (yes, the other parts are just as bad), it's just mooshing hand-wavy symbols around and hope it all comes out correctly in the end. I am suddenly very unsurprised when rails developers look at me with glassy eyes when I comment about writing (writing, not coding) something in CSS. "Just have the back-end developers do the front-end work," they say (who the "they" is, I have no fucking clue). "They can't even do the back-end," I respond, after looking at this stuff. This isn't programming. This is writing a script that stupidly, magically does what it should do, maybe, if you're lucky.

Or worse, "Oh, that's easy, just add it here," when you COMPLETELY FORGET THAT EVERYTHING IS LOADED ALPHABETICALLY and naming something xxx dependent on xxx_yyy already existing, WON'T WORK, unless you do some serious ruby-rails-class-loading-hell gymnastics, because they forgot about that alphabetical thing and no, you can't rename the variable to something more sane, it's already in the API.

So, yeah, go ahead, debug this shit. Tell me how someone who writes the html above is going to know even the basics of how to debug some obscure ruby class-loading bug when this is what they write.

Go on. Tell me.

</rant mode="off">

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