How Ruby and Rails Helped Me Become a Better Programmer
Publicado por Aníbal Rojas 31 Enero 2007 en General, Java, PHP, Rails, Ruby, Testing.Actually it did not help me become a better programmer. I must confess that I am not a good programmer, I have never been, and I think it would be difficult for me to become a better programmer. I am sorry to disappoint you, if your were expecting some kind of Rails Epiphany, but that’s the way it is.
Now, can you imagine a guy like me living in a J2EE centric world? Sitting in front of a Use Case, and feeling the breath of the XML files in the back of my neck? It was impossible just to think about the business problem I was supposed to tackle because I could not sleep. I suffered horrible nightmares were I had to implemented every single method of infinite interfaces that were dancing and laughing around a fire.
I can barely remember my wife’s birthday and our anniversary, she taught me those special dates using “old school” methods, and it is no fun, believe me. Do you think I can remember ALL the functions in PHP with all the little variants and lack of consistent naming without a headache? Please bring me some Tylenol.
But then came Rails, and suddenly testing was easy, and MVC was working out of the box without need for thousands of configuration lines. And it looked like a language for developing web applications (later my wife made me write a hundred copies of DSL definition). And templates where XHTML and Ruby, so I didn’t need to learn something new, and I didn’t need to wait for the weekly hour with my therapist to say “Actually I like SQL” without getting embarassed in front of other developers.
And there is a lot of bright people (I suppose they could write tons of XML files and memorize all the PHP functions if they would like) writing plugins and other stuff that helps me sleep better. And when I started learning new things about Rails, everything fit together softly, and it looks like all the pieces of the puzzle are at hand, and nobody has been hiding some of them.
This way, I can forget about my poor programming skills. And just meet with my customers, listen to their problems, focus on their business, propose and build good solutions for them. Sometimes I can even sit at my customer’s offices, pull out my laptop and work together with them. It is good Rails didn’t made me a better programmer.
Oh, I’m almost finished, honey. Yes, this is for the contest I told you. No, the prize is not a trip to the beach for two persons… What is it? Uh, oh, ah… A Rails book from Apress… OUCH! No please, not with the Sun Certified Enterprise Architect for J2EE Study Gui OUCH!
