
Sam Ruby: Keeping Up With Rails - davidw
http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2009/05/15/Keeping-Up-With-Rails
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zcrar70
I also agree with this - I find it particularly difficult to maintain apps
that I wrote for an earlier version of Rails, and which I had to lock to that
version to avoid the app breaking in hard to diagnose ways; I sometimes don't
touch these apps for a year or two, and working on them again means
remembering the idiosyncrasies of that particular version of Rails, which are
different from the idiosyncrasies of the version of Rails I'm using for
another more recent app I'll be working on.

In fact, it's bad enough that I've been looking for alternatives to Rails for
each new project I've started in the past year or so, but always give up
because I think it'll be quicker to use what I know (and then usually end up
regretting it later.)

~~~
carbon8
Well, thankfully one of the top priorities of the upcoming release is a stable
API.

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jaaron
A little late for that, but here's hoping.

Stability in a number of Ruby projects is a real problem: Rails, rspec,
numerous plugins and gems. I wouldn't care so much if everyone used a
versioning system that clearly communicated when things would break, but
that's not happening.

Maybe having stable APIs and proper versioning is too "professional" for
Rails.

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figured
"It is this type of change that has lead me to automate my regression testing"

Maybe I am wrong, but I think this post from Sam is about making sure you
automate your test environment, so you can keep up with changes. Not
complaining about how fast Rails changes.

~~~
zcrar70
The quote at the top of the page says: "the greatest difficultly of Rails
development is that 'best practices' have a shelf life of < 12 months"

Sam is quoting this (as opposed to making the statement himself), but putting
it at the top of the page seems to indicate that he agrees with it.

My understanding of the post is that Sam also deplores the rapid pace of
change, and has automated his test environments as a workaround.

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boundlessdreamz
Yeah.. keeping up with rails is kinda hard. The hardest part is APIs which
disappear for one revision and then come back later.

In this respect django seems to be much better.

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davidw
I love Rails, but this is a valid point.

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FraaJad
It's good to have tests, but shouldn't framework level libraries follow some
kind of Design by Contract methodologies so that you never break
compatibility?

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nonrecursive
Do other frameworks have this problem, and to the same degree as rails?

