Is Ruby on Rails Maintainable?

kale77in asks: "I've become a big fan of Ruby over the past few months, but I'm not at all sure about Ruby On Rails. Automatic code generation sets of alarm bells in my mind; so that, to RoR's promise of 'Web Development that Doesn't Hurt', I automatically add '...until you have to maintain it'. On the other hand, some writers and coders I respect (like the Pragmatic Programming mob) seem to be fans. I've mainly written generators in Python, to produce PHP/SQL/Java from SQL files, but I've always gone back to well-constructed objects, where extension and overloading offers more precise and maintainable customization than auto-generation allows. So is Rails just a nice RAD tool for disposable, cookie-cutter apps (which have a place, of course)? Is high-level generation just a bad OO substitute? And what has your experience of Rails' maintainability been?"

We've been told...

[fury88]

To stay FAR FAR AWAY from Ruby on Rails here. In fact, they sent us java developers to the Java conference and we were forbidden to go into any of those seminars. Why? Probably because they don't want us picking up any bad habits.

Re:Uhm...

[eclectro]

Do you have a beef with compilers and assemblers?

No, but interpreters have always slowed me down.

Nobody even uses the scaffolding anymore

[bloodroot]

Unless they're making a promotional movie on writing a slashdot replacement in 5 minutes

Re:Yes, very

[Bruce Perens]

Hm. Then perhaps the best way to maintain code quality is to change languages every few years :-)

If you think Ruby on Rails is scary...

[NardofDoom]

You've obviously never worked with ASP.NET.

Doesn't work.

[Medievalist]

Sadly, the stupid are shameless.

Re:Yes, very

[pthisis]

Or you could just be incredibly elitist about it and shame bad coders into never publishing stupid crap for other people to see or maintain
No, the key is to have a superficial language feature that has no impact on development time but keeps people away.

Tons of parentheses seems to work well. Using indentation to delimit is another approach that's still in its infancy.