Ionrock Dot Org

My new job consists primarily of coding in Ruby, and more specifically, Rails. This has been relatively fun really learning a new language, but it is also rather draining. The hardest part is going home and writing Python. It is so easy to sit down, open a few buffers in Emacs and get something done. This is exceptionally frustrating then to go into work, only to battle against the massive amounts of magic that is Rails.

This explicitness over convention mindset is definitely a pythonic idiom. In statically typed languages, explicitness is mandatory, which is why many folks look at things like XML as a scripting solution. In a language like Java or C#, XML is a clean slate to write the operations you want declaratively. The downside though is you end up with oodles of XML configuration files.

For whatever reason, explicitness in Python is rather natural and simple. I suppose this is similar to Lisp in terms of the code being the data. I feel it could be the same in Ruby had Rails not touted its convention over configuration. This has got people thinking it is a good thing, when in fact it is not.

I am not suggesting it is always a bad thing either. A nice convention can save a lot of time, as well as making code easier to read and write. Where it fails though is when convention becomes the rule. It seems to be a subtle distinction, but looking at the community, you see a general feeling of value in meta-programming and DSLs using Ruby. It is ironic to me that this is so popular as most come from Java where XML was used in the same (arguably incorrect) fashion. It is always funny to see kids become like their parents while denying it at all costs.