The only place I’ve seen ruby used extensively is in environments with a lot of regular expressions and string manipulation. Still not entirely sure why I’ve only seen it used there. The regex tools in ruby are nice but they aren’t nice enough to justify a language switch in my opinion…
It’s the part of ruby that replaced perl. For whatever eldritch horror perl was it was very, very good at doing text manipulation, and IME the only language to really match that experience was ruby.
Yesterday I would have argued that with the rails framework Ruby is a great way to rapidly develop a scalable application. Today I started having an intermittent failure in one of my API instances and when searching about it the only thing I could find was one obscure blogpost that boiled down to “yeah sometimes Ruby Ave active record just screws up the character set off a string” exact same string, different results. Excuse me Ruby? How the fuck can you sometimes screw up a character set? There should be no sometimes to any thing here.
I like Ruby most of the time, but honestly, I’m not surprised at “sometimes” behavior from the language created by someone who, when asked for the formal definition of something in the language, said he’s “not really a formal kind of guy.”
I mean I’ve been using ActiveRecord for the last 20 ish years and I’ve never encountered or even heard of this bug. Sounds like you came across an especially obscure one.
I spent a few years with Ruby, and my experience is that Ruby and Rails couldn’t be more different in terms of programming approach, philosophy, and nature. I don’t trust Rails fully, but I do trust Ruby.
As a builder, I have had this scenario play out dozens of times. Clients paying millions for design and being shocked at what they get. My favorite was the charity that the architect spec’d custom handmade tile from Italy for… in a service bathroom lol. 40k to tile one wall of a bathroom for a charity that struggles to keep its doors open.
But programming is worse. In your analogy, once you finished the wall they’d come to you and ask you if you could „make the finished wall cheaper somehow?“ (because they are so incompetent that they think programming is magic and can magically change things in the real world).
And when you logically answer „no can do“ they won’t wake up to the fact they’re asking stupid questions, but rather think of you as not competent enough…
The problem with github isn’t really a problem. It’s just accessible enough to borderline tech people who want a one click solution to a problem. They can find it, but using it requires more skill than they have. It’s a code repository, not an app store. The most useful things I find on github aren’t from some massive app developer, they’re from some guy who happened to have the same problem as me. Rather than screaming at that guy for an executable, level up. Learn something.
Or head over to the releases page (just saying, it can be an app store too).
Basically, if there’s no exe ready and you don’t want to learn to make it, that means it doesn’t exist for you. The github page might as well just say “Coming eventually!”.
Tbf the released page can be hard to notice/find, a lot of projects who use it simply have links on the main page to it because a portion of users will fail to navigate there
I mean I code extensively and it still pisses me off they kind of don’t make the “download zip” more prominent or explain to noobs that this isn’t compiled/ plug n play…nor are most of the apps for Windows users, really.
This isn’t the job of a Git repository nor is it for GitHub, this is an issue for developers which shouldn’t use it as their main download way.
The download zip is not meant for the average person and frankly useless for most projects. I don’t know why you expect a Git repository to explain to you that bare code isn’t compiled or plug and play? How would GitHub know other than you informing them that the app isn’t for Windows?
I don’t think you understand the concept of what Git and GitHub even are and their intentions.
There’s no qualification to be a developer to access github though, I think is what the person you responded to is saying. It’s entirely possible for a user to end up at github without a true understanding of its purpose. Therefore, it would be helpful if it was more clear to the average non-developer user that what they’re looking at is a code repository and is not meant for general consumption.
And that’s the problem with modern internet and consumerism. I get your point, but the “I’m here, so I should be made comfortable and tended to” mentality really has no place in some situations. If you end up on a car parts website and have no idea what’s going on, you don’t just comment “Hey, this is really complicated, and no one warned me. Please consider making it more noob-friendly” because people usually know better, and understand that some things are outside their grasp, and that’s ok. This can be applied to academia sources as well. You would rarely see “What the hell is this all about?” below a rocket science article. So, my point is, GitHub is for people who at least know how to open the command prompt on windows. Maybe they should use this as a warning next to any GitHub link, idk.
I see you you’ve decided to take the road of not reading anything that has been said. There’s no bad usability OR lack of features for literally anyone relevant to these platforms.
I agree with most of what you said but it wouldn’t hurt to create a watered down version of the site and put it on a subdomain like noobs.github.com … There can be separate UIs for different kinds of users.
They could ask when you register an account what you intend to use GitHub for and what your familiarity is.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding… but are you saying GitHub, the corporate entity acquired by Microsoft for 7.8 billion dollars 6 years ago, is a champion of the free and open software movement and that needs some rando on the Internet to stand up for it?
People have lived through many cycles of Microsoft doing this shit. They don’t deserve defending.
Maybe I misunderstood your comment. I’m talking from the layman’s perspective looking for a stable build of whatever the software is.
"
Anything outside of code repository stuff is outside their lane
" sounds like you’re talking about non-technical users when that was the context of the original comment. I understand what you mean now though, and I somewhat agree.
Can someone explain to me why github apparently has bad UX/UI? I always thought the UI has gotten really good over the years.
[Edit] Like there this huge argument in these comments about the release button being all wrong. ??? No clue what people have against it. I thought it was fine? You can use it or not. People link to it if they want it more prominent. Someone explain?
[Edit 2] Also what’s up with the people who are vehemently against uploading bins to GitHub releases. This is literally what github is doing on their own repos. Not trying to say that anyone should feel obligated to release bins (CI/CD is a literal job title). People are releasing software for free because they want to. Let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth.
Idk I’m gonna stop reading this thread. its driving me crazy.
Around last year or the year before that they changed the placement of that button, never really given much thought about it tbf. Just a minor annoyance.
But yeah it was like in the same top row as the code/issues/pull-requests/wiki pages. Now you can only access it from the code page inside a lateral panel. Before that you could just jump to the releases from the wiki page, as an example.
I find that when you know how to use Github, Github is pretty easy and close to perfect for what it is, a code repository.
I think that most people who stumble across a Github link through a Google search, probably like in the original post, want to treat it like an app store. The read.me is the description, so they can tell it kind of does what they need, but they’re missing a big, green download and install button.
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