One thing I do here and there at Rupture is interview Rubyists who have applied to work with us. The Mythical Man and his Month notwithstanding, we could use a few more pairs of able hands. You know, so I can work less and blog more.

Our interview process has two parts: pair programming, and then some mostly-unstructured talk about the non-code aspects of software projects. Today I had the pleasure of talking with Josh Ferguson, and we ended up in a conversation about Rails’ new direction. Josh was concerned that as Rails matures, it becomes less opinionated, and therefore less attractive to the people who identified with the movement in the first place.

I’m still thinking about that, but the whole thing reminded me of a note I submitted to Obie Fernandez for inclusion in The Rails Way. It’s been more than a year since his book was published, and I never got around to cross-posting here… Obie had asked for contributors to answer the question: “what does The Rails Way mean to you?”

There’s a line at the beginning of the SICP lectures—a famous course on functional programming—where Harold Abelson is defining “computer science” for his class:

“Computer science” is a terrible name for this business. First of all, it’s not a science; it might be engineering, or it might be art… It’s also not very much about computers, in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not really about microscopes and Petri dishes, and geometry is not really about using surveying instruments.

The reason that we think that computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason that the Egyptians thought that measuring their plots after the flooding of the Nile was about surveying instruments, and not geometry: when some field is just getting started, and you don’t really understand it very well, it’s very easy to confuse the essence of what you’re doing with the tools that you use.

In the same way, my sense of “the Rails way” is not really about Rails, Ruby, or any of these new tools we’re using. Its “essence” is an uncompromising drive to optimize for productivity and happiness. It’s a hard-learned pragmatism: processes for people who refuse to solve the same problem twice, who are annoyed enough by the speed bumps their tools sometimes introduce that they happily gas up the steamroller.

A necessary corollary to the idea that Rails’ secret sauce is distinct from the code frozen to our vendor directories is that one day, a better instantiation of these practices will come along. I love Ruby, Rails, and their communities, but I know that we’ll all move on at some point. When that day comes, and some new 10-minute screencast makes us squeal like kids, we should have the sense to jump into it head-first, with the same abandon with which we dropped all that stuff we used to do for a living.

Anyway, if you’re interested in the SICP lectures, they’re pretty much canonical. (Nathan Sobo introduced me to them, and made me think about functional programming in general, when we were living in Venice. I’m a lucky guy.) A good way to get started is the set of lecture videos recorded at HP in 1986 by Abelson and Sussman, who started the course. Their SICP book is available online for free, too.