Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 160 posts

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

#121

Post by weatherlite »

nobleach wrote: post #118
weatherlite wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 (…

> My main point here is, that while one can work hard to try and tune Rails (Shopify's done it, Stripe's done it)

That's what I'm saying - you don't need to "work hard" to tune Rails in 99% of cases - your bottlenecks (if any) will probably be in the database layer. k8s simply solves it, so unless your argument is "infrastructure costs" or something I don't agree with your case. Shopify has such tremendous scale I think its ridiculous to use it as an example for the average company.

> When operating a highly dynamic site that services millions of requests a day, scaling k8s pods horizontally ceases to be a "win".

Why does it cease to be a win? Everyone is doing it no matter what stack they are on. So with Rails you might have a few more pods - for any startups that's going to succeed the cost is simply negligible.

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

#122

Post by sodapopcan »

ecshafer wrote: post #71

Shopify Developer here (opinions are my own) we are running Ruby on Rails (obviously) and we do well with it. It's fast to develop, fast to deploy, fast to test. I have no complaints with it. I would say my gut says that there are fewer bugs, fewer issues, fewer on call incidences, less downtime, and faster development speed than when I worked in a Java shop with micro-services and serverless and plenty of modern thi…

> Technical culture, discipline, quality of engineers and leadership matter so much more than what your tools are imo.

Hear! Hear!

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

#123

Post by likortera »

weatherlite wrote: post #109
likortera wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been at a company that did this, they started migrating everything to Go because it was the new cool thing to do and everyone was in love with it. One year later it was a mess of network calls, no ORMs and nearly-raw queries because who needs an ORM, migrations run by SQL statements on bash scripts because who needs migrations. Validations were custom wrappers on some validation libraries and validation errors w…

This is so true. Now there's ORM for Go (Gorm), and maybe a few web frameworks, but it just feels like any other beginning ecosystem - not much on Stackoverflow if you run into problems, docs aren't that good yet, incomplete APIs, missing functionality. And it has the same Node mindset of not having a major framework to tie everything together like Rails does- which I hate. To go to your bosses and tell them you have…

Well, the usual "reasoning" is that Go is easier to maintain, faster, will require less hardware, etc... all of those things might be true. What is not told in is the other side of the story, the one where you will have to write, test, document and maintain a TON more code... which usually ends up in just overall lower quality as it is pretty hard to find developers writing better code than the code you usually find in popular full stack frameworks.

But managers/directors, etc aren't idiots. They swallow it and they accept it even if they know the trade offs, because what's not told here is that if management says "No, that's madness" then people quit, and that's worse. So there we go with our super performant microservices for our 10 reqs/s app.

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

#124

Post by likortera »

swat535 wrote: post #65

If you Think Github, Gitlab and Shopify are relevant, then yes. Ruby on Rails remains an excellent technical choice for mature products. Note that, just like any other tool it has pros and cons, one should analyze the system requirements and use whatever makes sense. I would however, dare say that it is a great fit for majority of businesses. Honestly, majority of frameworks out there today will get you 90% of the wa…

My day job is as a JavaScript engineer, mostly doing React and Node. Some PHP which I never used before.

Last year during the pandemic I started to work on a side project, I picked Laravel because I heard a lot of good things, and having used Django in the past I know the value these frameworks provide. I'm building it using the "tall stack" [1] and it is just wonderful. The best part is not having to take 1000 decisions every second about what library or how to do this, or how to do that. Everything already has a place, and I can focus the little time I have to actually building what I want to build.

[1] https://tallstack.dev/

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

#125

Post by digisign »

somebehemoth wrote: post #107
digisign wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think most are directly comparing them as it might seem on the surface. Simply pointing that, if ruby is past its prime, then rails is as well. We don't know what the end project is for everyone, so choosing a web framework here in the comments is kinda early in the discussion anyway.

There simply is no evidence whatsoever that Ruby is past its prime. People are committing myriad logical fallacies: comparing go language to rails framework, anecdotes about Ruby monoliths, incorrect statements of fact about Ruby capability and more. I like Go, but this is a terrible comparison and I’ve not seen a single comment make a valid point about Ruby’s alleged demise.

Sounds a bit defensive, it is "past its prime":

https://octoverse.github.com/#top-languages-over-the-years

However, that doesn't mean it is dead, or you can't still do great things with it. Most platforms continue fine on into their twilight years :rofl:. Lotsa folks here getting shit done with perl and lazarus ide.

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

#126

Post by [deleted] »

jaredcwhite wrote: post #77
mountainriver wrote: post #50

Rails is like PHP. It’ll probably never die because people just keep propping it up. There are much better options, but some people just like the crap they know

Rails is like PHP — well thanks for that compliment! I'd much rather program in modern PHP than in any of the other obvious competitors to Ruby. From what my friends who use Laravel say, that's actually a pretty awesome (and certainly Rails-inspired) framework if you're a PHP dev.

[deleted]

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

#127

Post by mountainriver »

jaredcwhite wrote: post #75
mountainriver wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"trying to build services alongside it is truly awful" That makes no sense. It's very easy to build a REST API in Rails in which case you can connect to that API from services written in other languages. Conversely, you can easily call out to other services' APIs from Rails. In fact, I'll go so far as to say building a few choice services in particularly performant (lower-level) languages alongside a main Rails monol…

Yup its just that everyone else needs to learn the spaghetti code in the monolith. Which is universally hated by everyone not in the rails ecosystem

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

#128

Post by mountainriver »

weatherlite wrote: post #109
likortera wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been at a company that did this, they started migrating everything to Go because it was the new cool thing to do and everyone was in love with it. One year later it was a mess of network calls, no ORMs and nearly-raw queries because who needs an ORM, migrations run by SQL statements on bash scripts because who needs migrations. Validations were custom wrappers on some validation libraries and validation errors w…

This is so true. Now there's ORM for Go (Gorm), and maybe a few web frameworks, but it just feels like any other beginning ecosystem - not much on Stackoverflow if you run into problems, docs aren't that good yet, incomplete APIs, missing functionality. And it has the same Node mindset of not having a major framework to tie everything together like Rails does- which I hate. To go to your bosses and tell them you have…

huh? Go has had ORMs for ages and they are fine

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

#129

Post by mountainriver »

likortera wrote: post #99
mountainriver wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 been at a company that did this, they started migrating everything to Go because it was the new cool thing to do and everyone was in love with it. One year later it was a mess of network calls, no ORMs and nearly-raw queries because who needs an ORM, migrations run by SQL statements on bash scripts because who needs migrations. Validations were custom wrappers on some validation libraries and validation errors w…

Huh, well I've written lots of Go services and worked in lots of Go architectures and it was all worked really well actually. Looks a lot better than spaghetti code in a monolith

Maybe you're doing it wrong?

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

#130

Post by mountainriver »

irvingprime wrote: post #57
mountainriver wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rails does not have to be written as a monolith. Typically, junior programmers who are trying to move very fast do that. Most of the places where I have talked to people who have a monolith are looking for ways to split it into services. If you wrote a system in Go as a monolith, it would be hard to trim down, too. Architecture matters MUCH more than the implementation language.

That's totally fair, it seems to trend toward a monolith though, just from what I've seen
Post reply on HN