Ticket #229 (Fixed)Sun Jan 10 23:39:50 UTC 2010

A serious problem with the Ruby and Rails communities is the lack of backwards compatibility when moving between versions. One could spend all free time on a single Rails application chasing API updates. The Rails project describes itself as “opinionated software”, a sort of get-out clause for any criticism – “it’s our opinion, so we stick by it”. Unfortunately this has IMHO exacerbated the ivory tower arrogance that afflicts so many open source projects and acted as a kind of contaminant for other Rails developers who often have a similar rather aloof attitude. This is not conducive to good quality software engineering.

It is thus not without considerable irony that one of the key figures in the early adoption of Ruby and Rails should issue this statement on Twitter just before disappearing:

“programming is rather thankless. u see your works become replaced by superior ones in a year. unable to run at all in a few more.”

Yet the core team stick to their opinionated developments, breaking APIs with each release. My own experience is of entire projects risking failure thanks to relying on third party building blocks strongly recommended by the community, which just a few short months later, within the scope of the project, become abandonware as the community moves to the next new fad. It’s not impressive.

A larger site update is planned, but it’s a mammoth task – practically a complete rebuild of the whole thing – for exactly this kind of reason. I may get around to fixing the Hobix link in the short term but the real fix is to upgrade the whole lot. I can’t give a timescale for this unfortunately – presently I’ve not got beyond the stage of baulking at the enormity of the task at hand!

I think all the links have been updated, so it should be safe to close this bug.