Did I say I was tired yesterday? That wasn’t tired, this is tired. I’m currently training for the marathon, and today I was scheduled for a 13 mile run. Sadly marathon training does not wait for RailsConf so I was up at five this morning, viewing the fair city of Portland.

Say what you will about running, but it’s a great way to see a new city. It’s also a great way to get lost. I used the great website at USA track and field where people post their runs in order to find a place to go and promptly wrote down a street name incorrectly.

I ended up wandering around Portland’s lovely Willamette river, which fortunately provides a great landmark for a poor lost tourist. This led to running, and running, and running…and finally a Runners High.

Runners High is a phenomenon cause by your brain releasing endorphins, as a defense mechanism against the way your body feels. When I run my brain feels extremely active, and jumps from topic to topic making associations, breaking down problems, etc.

It’s not unheard of for me to fix a bug I’d been struggling with while on a run, in a sudden burst of insight. Today, when I wasn’t wondering where the hell I was, I started thinking about quite a few things one of which is related to the new IDE being developed and the barrier to entry on Rails.

Bear with me because this is a little out there, and I haven’t quite figured out how to articulate the concepts.

Right now Ruby and Rails are still strange and unusual things to most developers. When introduced to the language they want an IDE, and upon hearing there is no visual debugger or that they have to use Textmate, Eclipse or god-forbid emacs they turn away.

They stick with Java or C++ and wizards and comfortable development, and will wait until they need to use Ruby.

Then one day their boss hears about Rails. They tell the developer, ‘you should be using this!’ and so he goes and he gets an IDE, real slick one with lot’s of bells and whistles. He goes to generate a model—only he doesn’t use script/generate.

He uses a wizard, he sees he can add his methods and data members right there, so he does. Test? What test? Then he goes to the controller and has his controller manipulate the data all day, and develops a view in a WYSIWYG editor.

He spends all day in the debugger, and his methods get bigger and bigger. Of course that’s no big deal, because he uses cold folding to hide their size.

Then testers write Test::Unit code to test his code, and he’s done, because developers don’t test. Meanwhile we’ve all left Ruby because, “so much of the code is crap.” Haven’t we done this cycle before?

Chad Fowler described us as arrogant in the introduction, and clearly if you look above we are. I say we because nobody reading this had a problem with my rant, so you’re just as arrogant as I am. Caught you. We think we’re smarter than everybody else don’t we?

Actually I don’t and most of you probably don’t either. I just know that there is a right and wrong way to do things, and so does Rails. That’s why it’s so opinionated. An attendee, Jack Canty, put it better than I can by saying “Rails is opinionated, and this takes away those opinions.”

So how do we fix it? Well let me steal some of Micah’s DSL thunder by using an analogy I thought of while running. It’s morning, and you want a coffee. So you go to a certain ubiquitous chain and say, “I’d like a big coffee please,” only said ubiquitous chain doesn’t have big.

They have Tall, Grande and Venti. If you do this there will be a noticeable pause while the guy behind the counter takes a second to think about what you just said. He’s not a moron, take off his green smock and he knows what a big coffee is, but he’s got to translate it.

What’s big-is it grande? Venti? That’s because you’re not speaking his language. You eventually do get your coffee, because he can figure out what you mean, but it takes just a little bit longer.

While you wait in line you hear other people say, “I’ll have a grande half-caf no-foam latte,” and the guy behind the counter immediately repeats it. Eventually you learn the language they speak, and you get your coffee just a little bit faster.

You’ve adapted to the idioms of the coffee shop, and you’ve been rewarded for it.

So what the heck does that have to do with code? I kind of gave it away by using the phrase idioms, didn’t I? Well let’s say you’re a C++ programmer and you start on Ruby.

You don’t write Unit Tests, which despite what we sometimes think most developers do not do, and you sit down to iterate through an array. So you write:

index = 0
while index < array.length do
		puts index
end

Much like ordering a big coffee at the Green Angel, that will work, but it’s completely incorrect.

It’s not speaking Ruby even if it’s in the Ruby language, and unfortunately I believe that if we do not work hard to enforce and teach the best practices of the Rails and Ruby ways, we will witness this kind of thing propagated. I’ve done the C++ without test thing and lived in the debugger, and it drove me nuts.

Unfortunately many developers don’t think anything is wrong with that. If they did they’d be here already. That’s what programming is to them. The good news is that we are the early adopters, and when they come around they will adapt to our rules but only if we make them.

Remember what I said about the pause at Starbucks? Well the code above won’t pause. Ruby will execute it just as nicely as anything else, and maybe it shouldn’t, I’m not sure.

What I do know is that the IDE’s now being created should not be catering to the developer that wants to do the things the way they’ve always done them. Instead of opening ‘choices’ up and making things ‘easier’, our IDEs should enforce the opinions of Rails.

You see the late adopters aren’t lazy, or stupid, they’re just being rewarded improperly. If it’s easy to make a model without tests, they’ll make one, even if they are hurt by it later on.

They’ll even stay until 1 am to debug it, and their boss will think ‘gosh this Rails thing isn’t so great after all, thank God my programmers are so dedicated.’ Fortunately we control this.

There’s a reason the IDE makers are here, and that’s because they know that late adopters ask the early adopters what they use. Tell the IDE makers that you want an IDE that does not allow bad habits.

I want an IDE that is integrated with subversion, but I also want it to yell at me if I have untested code, and run ZenTest. If it gives me a wizard the first question it should ask is “what is the name of the test?.”

Instead of code folding to hide bad code, it should identify refactoring opportunities. Finally, I’m not sure I even want a debugger. Debugging sucks, and it’s a crutch. I can test behavior rather than step through it and look at it.

I realize people do want debuggers, I just worry for the day when Rails code can’t be properly understood without stepping through it.

Tell the IDE developers that you want an IDE that helps create good code, not easy code. If they don’t do that, then when developers ask you what you use say emacs. If the developer still turns away, we probably aren’t losing much.