Bad practices

After a year and a half working in other languages, I’m back to Ruby. And, one of the things that I was amazed at Clojure is how simple things were.

Back to Ruby, I’m really surprised on how people overcomplicate things.

There’s no perfect language, nor perfect community of languages. In Clojure, there are fewer abstractions, which is not exactly a good thing – if you, let’s say, just want to create a simple page to show data from a database, you’ll find it extremely tedious to do it in Clojure, where in Ruby/Rails it’s just a few lines of code away. Ruby’s moto is “programmer happiness”, and this reflects in every library that they write.

But this kind of higher abstraction pays off with time. At least where I live, working with Ruby means working with Rails almost all the time. There are no “big competitions” for Rails or ActiveRecord (Sequel is a close one, but at the time of this post, AR have 10 times more downloads than Sequel), and other web frameworks are mostly “Rails-like”. But what bugs me most is “magic”.
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