Dérico Filho

This is an open letter to Raymond about his essay named “How to Become a Hacker”.

Hi Raymond,

I have read your howto about becoming a hacker. First off, according to your definitions of hacker, I am not a hacker - and also I do not consider myself as hacker. Therefore, as not being a hacker I do not know how great is my allowance to send this letter to you. I do not want to challenge your ideas, nor I have desire to enhance your thoughts.

However, I feel I should share a thought I had: “Rails-like framework considered harmful in early stages”.

RubyOnRails, CakePHP, DJango and many more. Are they wonderful tools that does a lot of auto-magic for us? Yes, they are indeed. They offer us DRY, MVC and force unto us OO thinking.

I think this auto-magic is a double-handed feature of them, because as it facilitates for us the day-by-day dirty work, they also hide from usrelevant knowledge on how things are done. Therefore, beginners tend trying fit their needs into the framework boundaries. “Well, I need ABC feature to use in this XYZ system I am developing - let me check if there is a component that does it for me. Alas! There is not, what am I going to do?”, perhaps a lazy beginner would say. Develop the ABC feature may not ever come across his mind. (”It is reinventing the wheel” some would say, but trying to reproduce things is a very good way to gain knowledge).

Understanding the laying logic beneath the whole magic is very significant - it is a very special kind of logic, because it enlighten us about the real limits of what things can or cannot be done and how they could or should be done.

Concluding, I would like to ask you to put in this essay of yours the following paragraph by the end of the second one in “1. Learn to Program” session:

“[...]you have to know what the components actually do. The same goes for the Rails-like framework (RubyOnRails, CakePHP, DJango &c), although they are magical on getting things done, they hide from you significant knowledge of how they perform their magic. Now I think it is probably best to learn C[...]“

I have written a web log post further developing this point of view of mine. I pray you read, if you will, at

http://blog.cirello.org/2007/09/24/imho-cakephp-made-php-bondage-and-discipline/

Yours sincerely,

Dérico Filho