Ironically, Hobo is trying to address exactly my concerns with the state of Ruby/Rails projects in general, but my fear is that there is something in the language or the framework itself which causes the developers to hit !00% cpu on the coding side once some threshold is hit.

And I totally agree with Michiel re: releasing stuff and telling us about it even though its half baked. Although I still would like to assert that hobo is a “different kind of product” which makes the rails situps (and rails’ situps are a breeze compared to XML situps ;-) ) a thing of the past.

My concern is that many a Rails projects start out with lofty ambitions of making life easier for non “hard-core” coders, but end up being just as complicated as the thing they set out to eradicate and we’re back to square one (namely, reading the source to grok what’s going on)

I don’t think I’m explaining my intent clearly enough, but at least consider this an effort to convey that my objective is not to put down the team but to try to look at the general patterns of development in the Ruby world and try to understand what happens to so many wonderful projects which get left behind in the dust and just wondering out loud wheather it is some kind of limitation (kind of like what Python or other languages experience with their plethora of unfinished/unusable products)..

this may not have been a forum for this, but that is just as well.

I’m still here reading this because the screencast showed a couple of ideas I’d been working on myself. Albeit with a larger scope, a more solid implementation and DRYML to boot.

Reading the code and experimenting with it shows that it’s a solid foundation and, like Rails itself, is something that’s mostly extracted from real-world apps.

So doing a Hobo release or update is probably going to be secondary to running commercial projects, family concerns, social life, etc.

Which makes it hard for an outsider (like me) to commit to Hobo. The foundation looks solid, the implementation feels right, the project has everything it needs to start work with it .. except a few docs and examples beyond ‘hobo scaffold’.

Currently, Hobo feels like a closed tower. Updates are announced without a timetable or a feature list. So no-one can guess what’s coming next or when it will arrive. This is obviously frustrating because none of us can really work or play with Hobo like this.

I would advise the Hobo team to blog a bit more about various features and use-cases instead of putting the focus on documentation and new releases with new features.

By all means pile on the features, tell us to use an experimental branch and write up a blog entry when you’ve done something new. But hang the documentation until there’s more widespread Hobo use. Lack of documentation never stopped Rails. Rails took off because it looked cool, felt right, the developers did a lot of talking with examples and people just went with it.

Tell us more about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it and the walls come down. We’re not consumers of your product – we’re fellow coders who want to leverage the power of your code.

To be honest I don’t care that much about new Hobo features. The latest release has so much potential already that I wouldn’t bat an eyelid if the next release was just ‘fixes’. ‘Breaking changes’? Don’t care. Plug it in the CHANGELOG and I’ll rewrite my code/migrations/etc. New features are cool, but I’d rather have some examples to grok the code decisions.

On the PR side of things, I have to disagree with the title of this blog post. Garbage is cool and it works well for spy novels, but it really doesn’t work here. Silent projects are dead projects. Open projects tend to be vocal.

So, I went a little bit off-track. I can sympathise with with NameX and his fellow whiners but I also am fully aware of the factors that might influence Hobo updates, being in the ‘write code for third party use’ boat myself (not in Ruby, unfortunately).

So I’m sticking around.

Ruby landscape is littered with half baked projects and broken “documentation” projects. Add to that the “EFF YOU!” attitude engendered by the rails core (especially DHH) and you have a discouraging mix.

Maybe Ruby/rails is really easy to start a project with, but it has always been intriguing to me that there NEVER is any good documentation for 99% of the projects. Hobo is not doing anything new. If anything, they’re following the trail of dashed expectation to the letter.

the sad cycle goes something like this:

1. release a screencast

2. claim “extreme usability” while not providing proper documentation

3. Then just sit on some promised release as it gets cooked.

4. Eventually the interest wanes and by the time something actually arrives, there isn’t anyone around to take notice.

5. Release some documentation after telling people to go eff themselves because it is free. not that the Hobo team has done that, but the pattern is generally the same, ie; to denigrate the supposed users if they stop their ass kissing for a minute and actually ask for something.

6. something released but it is too little, too late. The product dies a slow death

7. Someone else starts at step 1 with some equivalent hyper claim and the cycle starts somewhere else all over again.

Why is it that most rails “producers” claim that their product will make life easy for endusers and then end up telling users to read the source because they just can’t be bothered with the discipline of taking documentation just as seriously as the code part?

I think we can’t be too harsh on Tom and the hobo team because they are at least sharing their product, but then again, why these promises when obviously the so called “screencasts”/docs are not even ready?

why is this behaviour so endemic to Ruby and especially Rails based projects? I always wonder. It almost seems like the Ruby community does essentially throw away stuff for the initial rush of releasing something or to use the project as a stepping stone for recognition, but there never is any long term commitment or expectation management. Ie Hype outpaces reality by a long margin.. why? why doth thou mock us thus o Ruby afficionados?

is it because there is a steep wall which people hit and then are just too busy fighting it to actually write any useable docs? and please, function defs are NOT documentation. I can’t belive people actually accept that as proper documentation. That is like step 0. (and even that is sometimes sorely lacking or outright ridiculous)

anyhoo, sorry for the rant.. I think I’m done following this blog. I’ll see hobo around when something useable for the supposed “audience” actually gets there. And for the record, the audience is NOT hard-core ruby developers (they are just fine editing a bazillion code snippets per rails project) as per the initial posts announcing Hobo.

Please excuse my frustration as well.

But anyway — don’t take too much notice of Nigel and his big mystery — he’s rather excitable ;-)

We have some new features, some docs, some improvements to the website…

Whatever — I’m sorry you feel that way. You’re more than welcome to a full refund ;o)

1. It was launched without docs
2. The new version promised a month ago still no sign of nothing
3. Once this wonderful new thing that supposed to show up in any day now … will also have no documentation.. and will promise documentation ..

life goes on..