Grumpypants McGee
I was on the BART this morning when I realized something: trolling the intarweb looking for articles on how Ruby can’t work or Rails is just a toy and then writing long, tedious rebuttals doesn’t make me happy. It’s something I feel like I have to do; as if the world would be horribly misinformed if I let someone’s “Array has too many methods” comment slide. But you know what? That’s not my job; no one cares; and any effort I expend jabbering into the wind about how, no, Array#last is quite useful, thanks–that effort is wasted.
Array too complicated for you? Declare those methods private. Problem solved. Can’t figure out Rails? Well, I sure can. And you know what? It’s made programming fun again. I get to extend the language I work with instead of compensating for it. I write elegant code on a daily basis, and at the end of the week, I refactor it all to make it even better. For a guy like me, that’s the difference between a soul-crushing 9-5 and a wonderful working environment.
Molly’s post on stank standardistas cinched it for me. Yeah, I can bitch and moan about people misunderstanding a wide variety of things (e.g., Ruby, Rails, web standards, nonviolence, consensus, Thomas Dolby), but it doesn’t really produce anything. From here on out, every time I read about someone complaining about this, that, or the other, I’m going to take that irritation I feel and convert it into energy for one of my projects.
So what’s next? Well, I’m working on a plugin for Rails that provides unit test assertions for markup validity, unobtrusive Javascript, and other things we should be doing more often. It should be finished over the weekend.