> I (perhaps foolishly?) believe that America has the opportunity to be a role model for the rest of the world in terms of how a society can work.
Yes, you believe foolishly. See below for why.
> But for all its problems, America has a lot going for it. It's a relatively free society, there is social mobility (more for some than others, it's true) and it's a nice place to live, even just in terms of its geography. (I live in California and so that of course will make me biased). Consider - America is a country that, despite all its problems, people risk their lives to get into. There's a simple reason why America continues to attract illegal immigrants - it's better than wherever they came from.
Background: I am an United States citizen now working in northern Europe.
To quote a TED Talk, "If you want the American Dream, move to Denmark."
The United States is not a free society. Is it more free than China? Yes. Is it more free than the majority of the OCED? No. They have gotten very good at selling the "American Dream", that is the sole reason people still risk their lives to get into it.
The dream cracked for me when I realised that despite 10 years of programming experience, I could not get a job in the U.S.; whereas, one month after searching for work in Europe and I had a job offer.
"Well, why didn't you start your own business in the U.S.?" My answer is simple: I am sick of living "at the pleasure of the king". To live in the U.S. is to be constantly unsure of where you stand with respect to the law. This applies doubly so if you start a business.
This problem with the law results from two positions:
1. Ignorance of the law is not a defence.
2. Interpretation of the law can change.
This brings up some major problems. Principally, how can I know the law if the interpretation (and thus the application) of the law is not constant? Add in low levels of corruption (on average, the bad ones are really bad) and different application of the law as a function of a person's class and you might begin to understand why I want no part of living at the pleasure of the king.
>Background: I am an United States citizen now working in northern Europe.
To quote a TED Talk, "If you want the American Dream, move to Denmark."
That's interesting to me as I am a Danish citizen living in the US. I grew up in Denmark but have no intention of ever moving back permanently.
I don't know how long you've lived in Denmark, but perhaps you are familiar with "Janteloven"? To someone who did not grow up in Scandinavia, it may just seem like another one of those cultural quirks that pops up from time to time. But, it is quite real and drilled into your head from the moment you're born. Some parts of the country are worse than others in this respect, but everyone succumbs to it at times. Many Danes make it a point to vigorously deny this.
Perhaps it's just because I grew up there, but I was overjoyed when I found out that my family was moving to the US. I definitely feel more at home here than anywhere else in the world.
With that said, I can absolutely understand why you, as an American, would like and probably prefer to live in Denmark. The people are friendly (mostly, there's always a grouch somewhere), it's a well-educated culture, and the social safety net is enviable. If you're okay with the tax rate and don't mind the weather, I would agree it's quite idyllic.
Also, the points you make about the US being a litigious society are well taken. The US is rightly made a laughing stock for people being able to sue McDonalds for making them fat. That's just ridiculous.
So I think it may just be that we value different things in life. I've met many American expats in Europe who would never want to go back, who feel, as I do, that where they are is their home. If we all are interested in making where we live a better place, that's probably the best we can do.
Marking a bug as "wontfix" because the developers of the RoR platform are arrogant enough to say, and I quote, "[...] figure out what other software is putting that version in your environment and stop it from doing so" is now called mature?
The dialogue on this bug alone was enough for me to put RoR in my rear-view mirror and not look back.
Which would you rather use: a tool which demands it is the only tool on your system which can set environment variables (RoR), or a tool which plays well with others (Django)?
"figure out what other software is putting that version in your environment and stop it from doing so"
I don't think you understand the context here. The Rails dev is saying (correctly) that nobody should be polluting the environment with a variable as vaguely named as "VERSION" this includes Rails.
Rails uses the "VERSION" environment variable temporarily for migrations. They're not trying to "claim" that variable name for themselves only.
As someone who's worked with both Rails and Django professionally for years, Rails is far more mature. Both are quality frameworks, but Django has far more warts, and the quality and number of good third-party libraries really isn't close. Django has forms and the admin going for it, and South is really excellent, but on the whole Rails feels better thought-out and more flexible than Django.
Django is very strong as a rapid-development tool (forms, generic views, admin), but I am more comfortable with Rails for a project with a reasonable timeline. Django class-based views are a far cry from Rails controllers.
They just need to rename the environment variable into something like RAILS_VERSION instead, as suggested by several commenters in that issue. Such a simple fix, I don't understand why they won't do that.
1) VERSION is a horrible name for a non-transient environment variable. It's fine if you're just using it on a per command basis (as rails does with 'rake db:migrate VERSION=123') but some app has stuck a ridiculously generic word into a global namespace.
2) (trivial) RAILS_VERSION would make no sense because it's the migration number you want to set your database too.
Any non-transient variable that you need to set should be specific enough to not conflict with other apps using the same namespace.
If anyone should go fixing things it's the fool who permanently stuck a variable called VERSION in their users global environment hash.
I agree that there is a problem and that it is affecting rails users. But, if for example some whacko was running around slapping all rails users with large fish would it be the rails dev teams responsibility to stop him? No.
No development team should have to tailor their app to compensate for the stupidity of one ignorant developer who couldn't think about the ecosystem that we all have to share. The only exception to this is when the idiot developer got a job building your OS...
Meh, using an environment variable named VERSION isn't too bright, and if it's for a single command then it should be a command line argument. RAILS_VERSION may not be appropriate but it's more intelligent than using an extremely generic and common name like VERSION.
Yes, you believe foolishly. See below for why.
> But for all its problems, America has a lot going for it. It's a relatively free society, there is social mobility (more for some than others, it's true) and it's a nice place to live, even just in terms of its geography. (I live in California and so that of course will make me biased). Consider - America is a country that, despite all its problems, people risk their lives to get into. There's a simple reason why America continues to attract illegal immigrants - it's better than wherever they came from.
Background: I am an United States citizen now working in northern Europe.
To quote a TED Talk, "If you want the American Dream, move to Denmark."
The United States is not a free society. Is it more free than China? Yes. Is it more free than the majority of the OCED? No. They have gotten very good at selling the "American Dream", that is the sole reason people still risk their lives to get into it.
The dream cracked for me when I realised that despite 10 years of programming experience, I could not get a job in the U.S.; whereas, one month after searching for work in Europe and I had a job offer.
"Well, why didn't you start your own business in the U.S.?" My answer is simple: I am sick of living "at the pleasure of the king". To live in the U.S. is to be constantly unsure of where you stand with respect to the law. This applies doubly so if you start a business.
This problem with the law results from two positions:
1. Ignorance of the law is not a defence.
2. Interpretation of the law can change.
This brings up some major problems. Principally, how can I know the law if the interpretation (and thus the application) of the law is not constant? Add in low levels of corruption (on average, the bad ones are really bad) and different application of the law as a function of a person's class and you might begin to understand why I want no part of living at the pleasure of the king.