Rails%203%20In%20Action

542 APPENDIX A Why Rails?
it helps you make less silly mistakes and provides the groundwork for you to test the
fixes for any bugs that come up in your system. Ruby, just like every other language, is
no good at preventing buggy code. That’s a human trait that is unavoidable.
The shift away from SVN to the wonderful world of distributed version control was
also a major milestone, with GitHub (a Rails application!) being created in early 2008.
Services such GitHub have made it easier than ever for Ruby developers to collaborate
on code across cultures. As an example of this, you only need to look at the authors of
commits on the Rails project to see the wide gamut of people.
Don’t just take it from us. Here’s a direct quote from somebody who had only been
using Rails for a few days:
When I am programming with Ruby I think I’m making magic.
—New person
Although Ruby isn’t quite the magic of fairy tales, you’ll find young and old, experienced
and not-so-experienced people all claiming that it’s just a brilliant language to
work with. As Yukihiro Matsumuto (the creator of the language) says: Ruby is
designed to make programmers happy. Along the same lines, the Rails claim you saw
earlier, “optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity,” is not
smoke and mirrors either. You can be extremely happy and productive while using
Rails, compared with other frameworks.
Let’s dive a little deeper into the reasons why Rails (the framework) and Ruby (the
language) are so great.
A.1 Reason #1: the sense of community
The Rails community is like no other on the planet. There is a large sense of togetherness
in the community with people freely sharing ideas and code through services
such as GitHub and RubyGems (see Reason #2). An example of this is the vibrant
community on the Freenode IRC network (irc.freenode.net) where the main #rubyonrails
channel is primarily used for asking questions about Rails. Anybody can come
into the channel and ask a question and receive a response promptly from one of the
other people who visit the channel. There’s no central support authority: it’s a group
of volunteers who are voluntarily volunteering 3 their time to help strangers with problems,
without asking for money or expecting anything else in return.
There’s also a large support community focused around Stack Overflow (http://
stackoverflow.com) and other locations such as the Ruby on Rails Talk mailing list
(http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk) and Rails Forum (http://
railsforum.com). Not to mention, there’s also the RailsBridge (http://railsbridge
.org) organization, which aims to bridge the gap between newbies and experienced
developers.
All of these different areas of the internet share a common goal: be nice to the
people who are asking for help. One mantra in the Ruby community is, “Matz is nice
3 Too much “volunteer” usage, perhaps. It was voluntary.