Aaron Sumner
Make magic with Ruby DSLs
Demystifying your favorite libraries' domain-specific languages
For better or worse, I believe you can develop basic, yet useful, applications in Ruby on Rails with just a minimum amount of Ruby knowledge. Rails tucks away details behind object-to-table mapping, routing, database preparation, and other necessities for web applications to function. So, is Rails magic? It may seem like something shady’s going on behind the scenes at first, but all of these examples are really just instances of well-designed domain-specific languages within the Rails framework.
A domain-specific language, or DSL, focuses on a particular problem set, or domain, instead of trying to be all things to all people. By contrast, typical programming languages like Ruby are general-purpose languages–they offer a large, varied set of tools to accomplish any number of tasks. Ruby itself is a great example of a general purpose language: You can use it to perform system maintenance tasks, retrieve data from external services, calculate statistics–not to mention, develop complex web applications. But what if you need to focus on a specific task, like running system backups, test-driving software development, or defining database migrations in a Rails application? This is where DSLs come into play.
There are two types of domain-specific language, as defined by Martin Fowler. An external DSL requires its own parser to process commands passed to it. The result is a language that will likely not look at all like the language it was implemented in. SQL, for example, is an external DSL. You interact with a database via a language developed specifically for creating queries–not in the language your database itself was written in.
The self-made developer: bootstrap or bootcamp?
The hard way or pay to play?
Aspiring software developers have more avenues than ever to learn to code without going back to school. From free, self-paced online learning environments to not-so-free, structured, immersive experiences, a number of services have cropped up within the past few years offering to help total newbies become full-fledged coders (or maybe just pick up a new hobby). As someone with an interest in both the coding side and the instructional side of this phenomenon, I’ve spent some time reflecting on how these services compare to my own experience as a developer whose career choice and schooling diverged.
How Setting Aside Rails and Picking Up Padrino Might Make You a Better Ruby Developer
Learning languages through frameworks
I love frameworks. I love that frameworks like Rails and Bootstrap, in particular, make me more productive: People smarter than I have taken care of several decisions that distract from the typical goals of my web applications. I spend most of my time developing within the friendly confines of such frameworks, in part because I enjoy building—and delivering—applications I can show off to non-programmer friends (or clients, for that matter). They’re just not as impressed when I show them a Hello World app or a completed kata, for some reason.
Of course, there’s a danger here. With out-of-the-box, “omakase” Rails, it’s increasingly possible to create powerful applications with a rich understanding of Rails, but a so-so (or worse) understanding of Ruby itself. A well-done framework hides much of the complexity of a language, so the developer can focus more on the problem domain. But if and when an application’s requirements deviate from those for which a stock Rails installation is suited, a couple of things might happen for the developer who’s not sufficiently grounded in the language. At best, programmer productivity slows considerably. At worst, dirty hacks and kludges start appearing in the code base, and technical debt mounts quickly.