Well, that’s the saying. One thing is for sure. You can’t expect to get what you don’t pay for.
I got an IM from a buddy this afternoon looking for a second opinion on a Rails application. Someone had paid for 100 hours of work (I don’t know at what rate), for a Rails project which wasn’t progressing to his liking. He’d asked my buddy to give an opinion of what had been done, and I was asked to have a look as well.
I only spent about a half hour or so looking at the code, since I was doing this as a courtesy. I spend quite a bit of pro-bono time helping others by writing here and contributing on public fora, but I’ve got my limits.
The executive summary: I wasn’t impressed.
Many Rubyists have reached a point sometime where they have had problems straightening out dependences between source files.
If you break a Ruby program into separate files, definitely a good practice for all but the smallest projects, it can be difficult to figure out how to get the files required in the right order, and if there are circular dependencies between the definition order of modules and classes, you might think you are forced into tricks like defining an empty module or class, and then filling it in later.
Rails programmers have grown accustomed to the automatic class loading provided by ActiveSupport. It’s a hidden Ruby secret that the Ruby language has support for automatic class loading built right into the standard class library in the form of the the Kernel#autoload, and Module#autoload methods.
They’ll still have the fastest Java VM for Nehalem.
The rumors about IBM acquiring Sun Microsystems have been running rampant the past several days. I remember when we used to talk about that all the time.