One of Rails' biggest influences on the Ruby community (aside from making you feel like a jerk if you don't write tests) is that there is one "best" way to do common things and you should only deviate from the convention when necessary.
This is great most of the time, because it allows people to jump right into code they've never seen before (or haven't looked at in a while) and know exactly what's going on without having to follow a bunch of code paths and random classes. Having trouble with a poorly documented gem? Just jump into the code because all gems are laid out the exact same way.
However, often when you know something is pretty standard functionality (like doing an SSL request with net/http), you know it's been solved many times before and just find the first article on Google about it and do it that way. And you're about 100 times more likely to just blindly copy and paste the code when it comes from the guy who wrote the most popular Ruby HTML parser.
I see the same thing all the time in iOS development. Everyone just uses the same patterns that Apple puts in their documentation, which is why Joe Hewitt's Three20 framework was such a big deal.
Is "the guy who wrote the most popular Ruby HTML parser" actively promoting this, though? I know that everything thinks Twitter is an advertising platform, but it could be he just thought it was a cool hack and wanted to show his friends. It's invigorating to get positive feedback about something you think is cool even if the actual feat accomplished is relatively small, like flipping a flag on Ruby's SSL module.
He didn't write a tutorial based on this methodology and I definitely don't see it pimped around anyway. gist is a pastebin, after all.
..which is why Joe Hewitt's Three20 framework was such a big deal.
Three20 wasn't a big deal because it was different from Apple. The noise behind Three20 is that it was (and still is, to a large degree) a cluttered mess of a framework that made it near impossible to use one part without importing the whole thing. I believe that Joe Hewitt has basically said as much on Twitter as well.
If you were to instead point out Apple's template code as a good example of code that is widely-used and not very good, you would have a much better analogy..
Oh yeah I agree that Three20 is a cluttered, monolithic mess. What I should have said was that Three20 was the first major attempt (that I know of) to break away from the strict nested-controller way of making data-driven apps by implementing a pretty nice URL-based application model.
It's not slightly more flexible, it's hugely more flexible. As someone who has apps that consist of a complicated web of tableviews, Matt Gallagher's work is amazing and helped me immensely.
One of Rails' biggest influences on the Ruby community (aside from making you feel like a jerk if you don't write tests) is that there is one "best" way to do common things and you should only deviate from the convention when necessary.
This is great most of the time, because it allows people to jump right into code they've never seen before (or haven't looked at in a while) and know exactly what's going on without having to follow a bunch of code paths and random classes. Having trouble with a poorly documented gem? Just jump into the code because all gems are laid out the exact same way.
However, often when you know something is pretty standard functionality (like doing an SSL request with net/http), you know it's been solved many times before and just find the first article on Google about it and do it that way. And you're about 100 times more likely to just blindly copy and paste the code when it comes from the guy who wrote the most popular Ruby HTML parser.
I see the same thing all the time in iOS development. Everyone just uses the same patterns that Apple puts in their documentation, which is why Joe Hewitt's Three20 framework was such a big deal.