(This is a snapshot of my old weblog. New posts and selected republished essays can be found at raganwald.com.)
Monday, June 09, 2008
Bitchiness also sucks
Chuck, thank you for saying what needs to be said. Bitchy blog posts purport to describe shortcomings, but are they anything more than thinly veiled chest thumping from an author who feels he is the smartest person in the room?
p.s. Question: Are bitchy blog posts about bitchy blog posts (like this one!) still bitchy blog posts?
“This framework I never use in a programming language I also never use is designed in a way that I don’t like, so I’m going to raise a ruckus even though I’m never going to use it and there are other frameworks that meet my design standards better” just seems like a dumb thing to write a bitchy blog post about.
—Chuck Hoffman, activerecord sucks, but it doesn't matter
Chuck, thank you for saying what needs to be said. Bitchy blog posts purport to describe shortcomings, but are they anything more than thinly veiled chest thumping from an author who feels he is the smartest person in the room?
p.s. Question: Are bitchy blog posts about bitchy blog posts (like this one!) still bitchy blog posts?
Comments on “Bitchiness also sucks”:
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> Question: Are bitchy blog posts
> about bitchy blog posts (like this
> one!) still bitchy blog posts?
nope.. it is a meta-bitchy blog post :)
> about bitchy blog posts (like this
> one!) still bitchy blog posts?
nope.. it is a meta-bitchy blog post :)
I was thinking “bitchy blog meta-post” but I can also understand teh argument for “bitchy meta-(blog post).”
It's a very thin line, since we could use a whole lot more objectivity in the way we approach our technologies. People pointing out real weaknesses are good. On the other hand, picking on things for non-factual reasons amounts to being irrational about defending your favorite technology. Not too useful.
So long as people are careful to stick to facts (that make sense) the discussions are constructive. Bitchy then is just an entertaining style of writing :-)
Paul.
http://theprogrammersparadox.blogspot.com
So long as people are careful to stick to facts (that make sense) the discussions are constructive. Bitchy then is just an entertaining style of writing :-)
Paul.
http://theprogrammersparadox.blogspot.com
Paul:
Don’t drag facts into this :-)
Seriously, even when people are stating facts, the problem is that the facts arrive without any context. This is especially true when the person blogging doesn't have a useful perspective on the matter.
This is why I really prefer to read people bitching about things they actually use and love. When someone gives something a cursory once-over and then bitches about it, the usual take-away is that they tried to shoehorn it into their pre-existing model of how things should work and haven't grokked its own particular style and the trade-offs it presents.
Don’t drag facts into this :-)
Seriously, even when people are stating facts, the problem is that the facts arrive without any context. This is especially true when the person blogging doesn't have a useful perspective on the matter.
This is why I really prefer to read people bitching about things they actually use and love. When someone gives something a cursory once-over and then bitches about it, the usual take-away is that they tried to shoehorn it into their pre-existing model of how things should work and haven't grokked its own particular style and the trade-offs it presents.
My problem with activerecord is that it is halfassed. It should be an interface for an OO database (implemenation of which is abstracted away). It should not be a wrapper for a relational database.
I'm thinking of how bigtable is used with appengine. You define the object, you tell it to save, you don't care where it goes.
If activerecord worked that way, it'd be much more useful. Instead activerecord becomes a redundant interface. SQL itself is a database-agnostic generic interface language. You don't need to wrap it in another one.
I'm thinking of how bigtable is used with appengine. You define the object, you tell it to save, you don't care where it goes.
If activerecord worked that way, it'd be much more useful. Instead activerecord becomes a redundant interface. SQL itself is a database-agnostic generic interface language. You don't need to wrap it in another one.
Sean:
I think the phrase you are searching for is “not to my likeing.” half-assed suggests the authors were trying to implement the design you have in mind, but fell short. Whereas you explain that they were trying to do something else entirely.
Which is not to say Ruby’s ActiveRecord does a good or a bad job of what it does, just that by your own words it is trying to do something entirely different than what you want a database API to do.
I think the phrase you are searching for is “not to my likeing.” half-assed suggests the authors were trying to implement the design you have in mind, but fell short. Whereas you explain that they were trying to do something else entirely.
Which is not to say Ruby’s ActiveRecord does a good or a bad job of what it does, just that by your own words it is trying to do something entirely different than what you want a database API to do.
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