Two things I read recently were commentary on forcefully-weak communications.

The first, from a r/rails thread in which the poster wrote “I hate React as it’s not using MVC pattern and It’s not organised + I hate JS.” A response:

You mentioned that you’re looking for junior positions which implies that you’re relatively new to the industry and have limited programming experience. Despite this, it seems that you’ve developed a lot of strong opinions.

There’s nothing wrong with having strong opinions and some of the best engineers are very opinionated. However, one of the biggest things you learn as you gain more experience is that you don’t know what you don’t know and that while forming opinions is important, one should understand why we may form certain opinions and whether those reasons are actually valid enough to hold those opinions strongly enough.

For example, you say that you hate JS. Hate is a very strong word for junior developers. Why do you hate JS? Is the hate that you have for the language actually for the language itself or rather code that you’ve written in it? If you’ve been forced to work on an awful codebase, then the language itself isn’t to blame.

You mentioned that you hate React as it’s not using MVC pattern. What is it about the MVC pattern that you like? There’s a lot of advantages with the MVC approach, but other approaches also have merit. As you gain more real-world experience, you’ll realize that there are many ways to do things and each approach has its own merits/disadvantages. You mentioned that React is not organized, but React is not a framework - it’s a library. You can organize it however you want which can be a double-edge sword if you’re inexperienced. Any disorganized React project is not React’s fault nor is it a fault of JS.

Unlike React, Rails is a framework and a very opinionated one. It can be beginner friendly as things will just work out of the box as a lot of decisions have already been made for you. However, it can also be difficult for beginners to level up as Ruby is a lot less explicit and a lot of the behind the scenes magic can be very confusing to figure out why things work the way they do. There is also a lot more ways to write your code in Ruby which means there’s a lot more syntaxes and patterns you may need to be aware of to be competent. (e.g., there’s only a certain number of ways to write a loop in Python but a multitudes of ways in Ruby). This flexibility may seem like a blessing to be able to write expressive and elegant code, but for beginners, it can make the process of leveling up a lot more work.

You should be open to the possibility that you may also not end up loving Ruby when it actually comes to working on production code. Many of us here love Ruby, but it should be stated that there’s a difference between tinkering and using Ruby for toy-projects and maintaining a Rails app. Also, Rails does not make JS go away. You may find yourself writing plenty of JS in Rails to get the desired UX on the frontend.

At the end of the day, I do love Ruby and there are plenty of Rails opportunities in the market so I do think it’s worth learning. But if you want to pursue Rails, you should jump in with both eyes open. You may find that your criticisms of JS & React may not actually be as valid and be specific to the projects that you worked on. If there are a lot more opportunities for you in JS/React than Ruby/Rails, it may be worth continuing down that former path.

And Andrew Bosworth “On Sarcasm”:

At first being sarcastic was incredibly satisfying. Whereas previously I might have made an earnest argument or asked a question, I now seemed to be able to jump right to the part where the group appreciated me and my contribution. What is even more impressive is it required very little thought to execute. I could often get a positive reaction even on topics I knew almost nothing about.

It was when I noticed this last point that I decided that sarcasm was not for me.

Sarcasm “works” because it alludes to a critique without ever actually making it. It shifts the burden of substantiating the criticism as an exercise for the audience and further suggests that if they don’t already understand it then they are deficient. Making a critique implicit is an unassailable rhetorical position. The most socially acceptable response for the group is to go along with it, as you have given them nothing specific to challenge. And if someone does challenge it you can simply demur and say it was “just a joke.”

Sarcasm does nothing to advance our understanding of the world around us or help us improve it.