DHH interviewed by O'Reilly

Robby Russell — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 06:46:00 -0500

I just finished reading a very nice interview of David by O’Reilly

You can read it here.

While reading it, I recalled a brief conversation that I had the other day, when someone said that they didn’t like Rails because, “it assumes things” which translated to the fact that they didn’t like that it had a uniform directory structure, pre-defined naming conventions, etc.

After spending this whole year, teaching myself Rails, reading the documentation pages… (probably at the API site a few hours a day), this concerned me. A lot of people are quickly turned off by the fact that Rails has opinions. But, let’s think about this for a moment. Rails has opinions built-in that help speed up the development process when you accept those opinions. If you don’t, you don’t have to pspend any more time than you did prior to using Rails. So, their argument is, “why bother with Rails?”

At first, the answer isn’t so obvious…. but if you consider all the opinions that Rails expresses, do you honestly feel that every one of them is wrong? If so, Rails is probably not for you. If you find a good portion of them to be quality opinions, then… Rails just might be your cup of tea afterall.

Pluralization make you feel weird? Turn it off. (one line of code will do this for your whole application.

Wait, you want to use category_id as your primary key?

class Category < ActiveRecord::Base
  set_primary_key "category_id"
end

Yes, I know… it’s tough. ;-)

Another thing that I am wondering now… what is the conductor?

My guess? Some added bonus for Rails that allows you to run a Rails application off of one or many servers… now that would be nice. That’s my guess though… what is yours?

Robby on Rails: DHH interviewed by O'Reilly

DHH interviewed by O'Reilly