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Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?

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Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?

#111

Post by weatherlite »

jetheredge wrote: post #101

We build and maintain a lot of Rails applications, with several of them almost a decade old. We have to keep them up to date, but Rails is stable and mature and this process is fairly easy. We come across a lot of web apps written in other ecosystems, using frameworks that were popular just a few years ago and have now been mostly abandoned. Or we get bit by an app that is a few years old and now has dependencies tha…

> We come across a lot of web apps written in other ecosystems, using frameworks that were popular just a few years ago and have now been mostly abandoned

Interesting, can you give a few names? Just so that I'll know to reconsider if I need to use one of them.

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?

#112

Post by weatherlite »

mountainriver wrote: post #45
digisign wrote: post #34

Ruby has been on the downswing for a while, getting squeezed from all sides from the meteoric rise of Python on one side, JS/Typescript on the other, to higher performing static languages on another: https://octoverse.github.com/#top-languages-over-the-years It also has a funky syntax, while not a big deal, doesn't do it any favors in a C --> Javascript world. Django, golang, etc. are free. I don't recommend starting…

This is the right answer. Yes people still write on rails but in my experience it’s because they haven’t used other tools. I had a couple die hard rails members at my last company who claimed nothing was better. We made them write Go for a year and now they are die hard Go fans. If I were writing a web app I would start with Go. It’s a great language that’s easy to learn and fast to write, with all the security of st…

I'm a die hard Ruby guy and now writing some Go and I pretty much hate it. I don't really care for performance or compile speed, I could barely care less. I want a good web framework with tons of community support and a language that lets me easily express my thoughts into code. I'm not getting that with Go.

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?

#114

Post by weatherlite »

nobleach wrote: post #51

As in will you find plenty of recruiters hunting for Rails developers? Absolutely. I've seen plenty of startups locally (Salt Lake/Provo) that are green-fielding with Rails. I've also seen later-stage startups that are transitioning their Rails monoliths to Elixir - and they're trying to hire folks that are willing to work on 4 year old Rails monoliths. That's not a bad thing is Rails is your thing. I enjoyed Ruby as…

> Having experienced some of Rails' scaling issues, I doubt I'd personally pick it for my next startup. I know time to market is vastly more important than scale, but it's also not hard to pick a different tech that DOES scale easier.

What part of Rails doesn't scale well? As I see it any mediocre devops can scale just about anything with some basic Kubernetes know-how, doesn't matter of it's Ruby or Java.

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?

#115

Post by ghotli »

newaccount74 wrote: post #92
ghotli wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But hiring engineers isn't constrained by region or location so this feels like an odd argument to me. Rails has been around long enough that there's surely no shortage of junior to very very senior engineers that will write code for you from wherever they happen to live.

I'm good enough at English, and I've learned to collaborate somewhat effectively remotely, but if given the choice, I still prefer collaborating with people in person and speaking my native language.

Perfectly reasonable. I'll freely admit I'd never considered this argument and a language barrier does make a lot of sense. In some cases that constraint could affect the talent pool significantly.

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?

#117

Post by aczerepinski »

mountainriver wrote: post #47
ericskiff wrote: post #23

We're still starting new greenfield projects in Rails every week, and I still believe it's the best foundation for SaaS products. It's great for developer speed and efficiency, the ecosystem of gems is amazing, and we've been able to scale every project we've needed to. We're incorporating React and GraphQL more these days for complex components and APIs but they pair nicely with Rails.

I work at a company with a large Ruby monolith and it’s a disaster. If you’re face deep in the Ruby ecosystem then I’m sure it makes sense, but trying to build services alongside it is truly awful. You want a scalable system that’s easy to write and will grow with you? Write basic Go services.

I've had great experiences with both Ruby and Go. Both are a joy to write, and can handle most use cases. When I'm writing Ruby I sometimes wish I had Go's type system and lightning fast test suites. When I'm writing Go, I sometimes wish there were more conventions so I didn't burn so much time thinking through the absolute perfect way to architect every little thing. Still, they're both wonderful languages that hopefully fade to the background of your consciousness so you can focus on the actual business goals at hand.

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?

#118

Post by nobleach »

weatherlite wrote: post #114
nobleach wrote: post #51

As in will you find plenty of recruiters hunting for Rails developers? Absolutely. I've seen plenty of startups locally (Salt Lake/Provo) that are green-fielding with Rails. I've also seen later-stage startups that are transitioning their Rails monoliths to Elixir - and they're trying to hire folks that are willing to work on 4 year old Rails monoliths. That's not a bad thing is Rails is your thing. I enjoyed Ruby as…

> Having experienced some of Rails' scaling issues, I doubt I'd personally pick it for my next startup. I know time to market is vastly more important than scale, but it's also not hard to pick a different tech that DOES scale easier. What part of Rails doesn't scale well? As I see it any mediocre devops can scale just about anything with some basic Kubernetes know-how, doesn't matter of it's Ruby or Java.

It absolutely does. When operating a highly dynamic site that services millions of requests a day, scaling k8s pods horizontally ceases to be a "win". One bumps up against the node count that is hit by the load balancer. (NodeJS experiences this quite a bit too). Rails excels in heavily cached configurations. This requires less volatile data.

My main point here is, that while one can work hard to try and tune Rails (Shopify's done it, Stripe's done it) - and I would argue that it's more of an effort than some DevOps personnel updating a pod count - it's fairly easy to start with something that is already very performant. SpringBoot is an opinionated framework for Java that has very good raw performance. I'm simply advocating that it doesn't hurt to start with something that's already pretty good. That's not premature optimization, it's just making wise decisions from the start.

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?

#119

Post by boboroshi »

mountainriver wrote: post #47
ericskiff wrote: post #23

We're still starting new greenfield projects in Rails every week, and I still believe it's the best foundation for SaaS products. It's great for developer speed and efficiency, the ecosystem of gems is amazing, and we've been able to scale every project we've needed to. We're incorporating React and GraphQL more these days for complex components and APIs but they pair nicely with Rails.

I work at a company with a large Ruby monolith and it’s a disaster. If you’re face deep in the Ruby ecosystem then I’m sure it makes sense, but trying to build services alongside it is truly awful. You want a scalable system that’s easy to write and will grow with you? Write basic Go services.

Monoliths can be great or a disaster, as can total services setups. We took a monolith built by a small team into scores of services across 4 teams of 150 engineers, even implementing some of them in Scala (this was 2012ish). On the internal tools side, we created a gem and later a bower package (so vintage) that was a bootstrap-derived design system that worked across almost all 30 internal tools apps & services. I know other teams did the same (at least consumer and merchant), but I didn't work on those projects so I can't speak to them.

I've seen great ruby/rails code and I've seen abysmal ruby/rails code. A lot comes down to who wrote it and if they ever refactored the smelly parts.

After 20+ years, I often see that no one likes to refactor the smelly stuff until they're forced to, and we often end up working with a cool racketball of code covered in 2' of duct tape patches.

Go is the new hotness, as was Rails at one point, and in the near future it will be something else. There's a strong neophillic bent to most developers. It's a lot more fun to work in something that's new and evolving and solving crazy problems than something that is stable.

These are all tools in the tool kit. Use what lets you ship.

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?

#120

Post by ryudoawaru »

mbrodersen wrote: post #90

I know that Ruby on Rails is still very much relevant for consultants being paid big $ to fix the disasters left by self-declared “Ninja” developers after they quit and move on to try again from scratch at another company ;)

Don't think it's a tech or language stack-related problem. You can easily find akin situation in any other stacks.
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