Edward Hieatt's blog
How my outlook on coding in Rails has changed over the past few months!
When I made the switch from Java to Rails a few years back, I, like many of my fellow Pivots making that same well-chronicled transition, delighted in the ease with which we could suddenly knock out a web app. How we cheered when our object-relational mapping took zero lines of code! How we applauded when we declared our model object validations in near-English! How we roared with laughter when convention viciously slapped the face of configuration! And how we shook our heads in dismay when we realized that our new development environment appeared to be from the mid-, if not early, nineties.
For, while we had arrived in a brave new world of minimalist declarative meta-programming, rapid prototyping, and an new-found sense of productivity that made even the most nimble forms of Java development look like wading through a morass of slimy boilerplate code and endless XML, we soon realized that the IDE situation was less than awesome. Our productivity was overall much improved, but we had taken a huge step backwards when it came to the act of writing - and especially changing - code and tests. Overnight, we went from living it up in a paradise of automated refactorings, seamlessly inbuilt test runners and powerful debuggers to roughing it with a text editor that, to our spoilt eyes, appeared to offer barely more than code highlighting and support for homemade macros.