From: hemant <gethemant@...>
Date: 2008-02-29T02:59:42+09:00
Subject: Re: Proposed Solutions - Was [ Re: Monkeypatching is Destroying Ruby ]

Hi Trans,

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 10:57 PM, Trans <transfire@gmail.com> wrote:
>  I think there is deep misunderstanding about all this. The main issue
>  is really that Rails has added so many extensions to Ruby that
>  inexperienced Rails programmers follow suit and extend Ruby willy-
>  nilly. But that's not Ruby's problem. Ruby is an open "agile" language
>  --it lets you override almost any part of the system. Yes, that can be
>  "dangerous", but it can also be extremely powerful. It's up to the
>  programmer to consider their usecase and make the call. No amount of
>  preventative obstruction is going to make anything better, it will
>  only make life more difficult for those who use MP appropriately. I
>  personally think Ruby has too many meta-obstructions as it is. I
>  certainly don't want more.

Rails has increased Ruby's mind share significantly and perhaps first
time Ruby is being used to built applications that are really complex
and large. For example, I do significant work in Ruby without Rails
and my Rails project size is currently 71498 lines  ( including
plugins that I am using, but not the framework and not counting
Javascript, rhtml,css,xml,yaml ).

Too often, I have seen people blaming everything to Rails, but I do
not think its true in this case.
In the first link that I posted, whose fault it is? I have 103 gems
installed on my machine, and not counting
Rails libraries and facet , I still have around 5 or 6 of them, which
are modifying core classes one way or the other.

Trans, often on #ruby-lang I have heard from experienced rubyists why
they avoid facet. I do not think, its a problem of rails.
Ruby has grown and is being used by people with varying skills. I do
not think, features that help people in avoiding these problems is
bad.

As a last note, I will leave you with this:

http://blog.brightredglow.com/2008/1/17/evil-can-be-dangerous

So, no its not specific to Rails. Its not a problem either, but we can
do better.







>
>  If we can come up with a real solution --eg. a good selector
>  namespaces design, then great. But short of that there is no point.
>  You can already do this:
>
>   $ cat temp.rb
>   class String
>     def to_s; ""; end
>   end
>
>   $ ruby -w temp.rb
>   temp.rb:2: warning: method redefined; discarding old to_s
>
>  That ought to be preventive care enough.
>
>  T.
>
>



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