Comment by ukprogrammer
Comment by ukprogrammer 16 hours ago
I echo the sentiment that you MUST use a debugger when working with ruby/rails. When using a debugger, magic becomes a call stack that is transparently visible. Once proficient and familiar with the conventions, reading it becomes a lot easier.
For Rails's productivity, there's many reasons. One is the 'Active Stack' which acts as a 'standard library' of sorts for the framework.
It provides extremely seamless tooling all the way from the most frontend of concerns (ActiveView - HTML/JS) to the backend (ActiveRecord - SQL ORM layer) and anything in between (ActiveController - HTTP Requests, ActiveMailer - Emails etc.). These tools are simple, robust and cohesive.
These primitives are built on by the community to provide powerful tooling (Devise, OmniAuth, amongst others) that allows one to implement the standard plumbing most SaaS/CRUD apps need in a few minutes - billing, auth, emails so you can get to writing business logic in a few minutes and have the boring stuff solved quickly.
Implementing just these basics in JS can take many hours and have you scratching your head wondering "Why are there 20 different ways to implement X? Why is there no tried and true way for something that are surely been done thousands of times? Why hasn't someone abstracted these details all away yet? Why do I have to npm install for this basic functionality? Wait, why did my build tooling just break?"
So basically it's that it comes with built in libraries for common tasks? Authentication is definitely a super annoying thing to have to set up manually so I can see the attraction there.