In general, I’m really loving working with Ruby on Rails. (For the non-technical, that is a programming language and development environment.) I’m astonished at how fast I can build things with it.
But I do have one criticism. I am frequently finding one certain type of bug that is really annoying to me. A bug that would not occur in Java or C++ or another strong-typed language.
I write a valid Rails program. It fails with strange errors somewhere in the bowels of the Rails infrastructure. I scratch my head in great puzzlement. Finally, I realize what happened: I used a variable name that was already used by Rails. Something like “url” – something that you would expect that I could use. Ruby never warned me that I was overwriting a Rails variable – that’s perfectly valid. (Java or C++ would give me a compile error, tell me that the variable already exists.) Instead, with Ruby things just break.
I change the name of my variable to something a little less general, something like “story_url”. Suddenly, things work perfectly.
Not only does Ruby on Rails give me no warning, but I have yet to see a set of complete documentation of semi-reserved words (words that I should not use in my Rails application, though the Ruby language allows them).
How annoying!
