Off the Rails

by CodeNinja | Dec 9, 2009 | Customers, Programing

When learning a new programming language, The Internet convention is to make a “Hello World” program.  For those of you none-coders out there, that is as simple as it sounds. A simple program to output the words “Hello World” onto your screen, or a page on a web browser. The idea is to use something very simple, so you can speedily see the output of your code before you start on anything more complex.  In theory there is nothing simpler in code than the Hello world program.

For example:

PHP: <?php echo “Hello, world!”; ?>

ASP: <% Response.Write(“Hello, world!”) %>

ASP.NET: <asp:Label ID=“Label1” runat=“server” Text=“Hello World”></asp:Label>

BASH: echo ‘Hello, world!’

You noticing a trend here? Very simple, and not much code involved. Hell if we look at assembly language itself, which is considered a complex and long language.

bdos    equ    0005H
start:  mvi    c,9
        lxi    d,msg$
        call   bdos
        ret             

msg$:   db    'Hello, world!$'
end     start

Now. this week I have had to look at the insanity that is called “Ruby on Rails“. One of our customers is demanding we host/support it as he now has a new “Developer” (And I use that title in the loosest way) And the new guy only does Ruby On Rails (Or RoR from now on).  Now we have the facility to host it pre-setup on our servers.  So all we had to do was throw up a quick test page to double check it was all running OK. What was needed was a RoR “Hello World” test.

So following the examples in a book I set about writing a simple application to display “Hello World” onto the web-page. It took several hours of work, required over 200 different files, and a virtual-Host setup different to normal hosting before the words “Hello World” were there on the screen.

How shit a language (If i can call it a language) is RoR? Instead of the normal ONE line of code it took 207 individual files to do the same thing. Has there ever been a shittier application language invented?  If there is then I have never heard of it.

And to top it all off. the Developer in question seems clueless about the language. For example he did not have a public folder (required by Apache). he removed the default index page (which is correct) only he never re mapped root in the config/routes file. And has been bombarding our support ticketing system with very basic questions.

On a side note. While learning RoR, I got bored so played on the Interwebz. I found this developers, Twitter, Blog, Facebook, Company website. Yes it turns out he is a freelance web applications developer.  And yet his website is the worst I have seen in a long time.

Takes all sorts I suppose.

CN