On the Rails Maturity Model
So the Rails Maturity Model is reality.
I hate it.
I hate the actual concept of the Rails Maturity Model.
I hate it so much it’s making me think it’s time to start moving on from Rails and Ruby. Which is probably a slight over-reaction on my part, but anyway.
At best I think RMM is a marketing exercise for certain Rails consultancies.
At worst it fosters a myopic vision of Best Practice founded in the worst kind of Group Think.
As Yehuda Katz posted:
It makes perfect sense to create a forum for sharing and aggregating the practices that people are finding useful at the moment. What makes less sense is creating a ranked list of “popular” practices, with no obvious mechanism for mediating differences except pure popularity. And even worse is ranking firms by their aggregate level of conformance.
(see Incentivizing Innovation for more).
This is really the at the heart of the problem. It’s not that we’re against a forum for sharing practice and process, but the moment we start rating and ranking organisations we are engaging in the worst kind of group think that many of us are trying desperately to avoid.
If I wanted this sort of Best Practice, I would have stayed in the Java world …
What happens when you disagree with a number of the current practices that are make up the RMM?
What happens in the case where you have a different development philosophy?
There is no capacity for dissent in the current vision of RMM.
Full disclosure – I really saw red when I saw one of the RMM practices is “Haml for templates”. Genshi is beautiful. ERB is adequate. Haml is clumsy, brutal, ugly, wrong and demonstrably fucked.
May 3rd, 2009 at 7:52 pm
Huh, there are really no doubts, what you’re thinking about the RMM.
You know what ?
I TOTALLY AGREE !
May 3rd, 2009 at 8:36 pm
I am not as opposed to this as you. Maybe because I have a better beard than Obie.
May 4th, 2009 at 10:40 am
The entire premise of the RMM is corporate egoism – in those vids on Obie’s blog he continually refers makes reference to ‘community leaders’ (his company, etc.) compiling a list of best practices for smaller or newer Rails shops to follow. It’s very patronizing to assume that they should even make the effort do so.
May 5th, 2009 at 10:52 am
@Toby – Amen, brother. RMM sucks — big-time. If I may coin a term right here, it’s rutarded. Hopefully more bloggers will ridicule it until it becomes a source of unbearable shame for its “practitioners”. The word Rails shouldn’t be in it. That said, don’t run from Rails. Rails still rules in spite of RMM… so stick with it!
May 5th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
Totally agree.
RMM sucks. Haml sucks. I ABSOLUTELY love writing CSS and HTML, without that HAMLish crap.
+1
May 8th, 2009 at 10:25 pm
When I first heard about RMM I thought it was some weird reality-hacking, April-fool’s joke.
When I watched the vids and thought “man, these guys can really keep a straight face”.
*Shrug*.. I dig Obie, et al.. and I’ve often thought that RoR had a maturity problem, but I’m not sure this is the solution
June 11th, 2009 at 8:41 am
I always laugh at people who hate on HAML, they obviously have never tapped its true power, especially Sass.
Your loss I suppose
June 11th, 2009 at 8:47 am
What “true power” does HAML possess? I have yet to see a single concrete instance of HAML’s incredible disadvantages outweighing any of it’s supposed benefits over ERB or other templating tools.
Sass actually makes some sense, but it’s not the same as HAML.
May 21st, 2010 at 7:49 pm
Personally found that HAML gets in the way when talking to customers and designers who don’t do Python and ERB is a templating language they can understand quickly because it doesn’t involve anything that’s clever for its own sake. HAML’s for hacking and being obscure. I won’t use it on any new projects because it cost me a good customer one time – not making this up.
I like Sass, but like Toby just said – not the same thing, just uses some similar ideas.
Back to the Maturity Model – this is 1980/90′s management crap rebranded – some kind of pyramid with godlike status at the top? Level 1 is being able to do “stuff”, 2 repeat it consistently – 3/4/5 are so memorable I can’t remember them.
May 22nd, 2010 at 3:31 am
I agree on the maturity model, I believe in freedom of expressions so to say – I mean, _why hardly followed “best practices”. But you lost my vote when starting going at HAML, you contradicted yourself there. For you it might not be useful, but for me and many many others HAML/SASS is one of the better Rails plugins – though I personally don’t do or want to expect everyone to use it. Analyze your words, and you will see what I mean with contradiciton.
May 22nd, 2010 at 3:47 am
I don’t love or hate HAML, but if you are going to say something is “demonstrably fucked” maybe you should actually blog about or link to something that supports the “demonstrably” part rather than ending the blog post with a statement that sounds like a fait accompli
May 22nd, 2010 at 4:10 am
“Haml is clumsy, brutal, ugly, wrong and demonstrably fucked.”
May 22nd, 2010 at 4:18 am
I’m rather fond of Haml, actually, especially when used in conjunction with the tremendously useful Sass. Using indentation instead of closing tags means shorter, more readable layout files that are much easier to refactor. What’s wrong with that?