Still one of the best, if not best, choices for building a CRUD web app. I don't see this changing any time soon.
Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth it?
31–40 of 80 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth it?
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. Learning Python is quick and simple compared to learning data science or machine learning. Knowing Python and Django (which I do) does not afford you any ability do to those things.
Interesting. I assumed that spending more time working with Python would be beneficial, but I guess it's not a big deal. This is great to know, as I've been resistant to starting with Ruby/Rails for the reason I described. Thanks!
I don’t do machine learning or data science, so I’m assuming here, but I would imagine whatever you end up doing would be en entirely different service than your web stack and could be whatever language you wanted.
Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth it?
#33[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth it?
#34Much of what you learn in Ruby and Rails is not portable to other languages. Ruby and Rails are deeply flawed and much of what you learn is dealing with those flaws. Similar to learning PHP for example (but differently flawed than PHP). Ruby is also showing its age and is lagging behind modern languages. Rails is probably fine and fast and good for small projects. It is probably not good for professional large projec…
You should let AirBnb and GitHub know.
Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth it?
#35No.
Long time rails developer, but if you can green-light a project I'd highly recommend node all the way. I've found it much easier to comprehend a pure javascript stack (or even better an all-Typescript stack) due to substantially less cognitive overhead, find other people to work with (very important as your project scales), and the fact I can deploy node with a serverless implementation on Azure, GCP, and AWS makes it a home run when it comes to security and devops costs (and the need for devops in general).
While rails has a bunch of great features, those features (rightfully) have been copied elsewhere, e.g. Active Record, which has a fantastic javascript implementation - TypeORM.
Finally, when it comes to interface development, nothing in rails will get you as far as React these days, especially as the web moves mobile, and into AR/VR, which IMO present the next challenges of interface development. And like rails, nearly every question related to React/Node is answered on Stack Overflow or has a well-documented library to solve that use case.
Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth it?
#36Yes. Rails has by now certainly crossed into boring software territory – arguably a [positive thing]( http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology ) anyway – but it remains an excellent choice coming into 2018: - Out of the box, Rails has close to unbeatable developer ergonomics, tooling, stability, and ease of use - Lots of high quality, large companies use it (GitHub, Shopify, Airbnb, Square, Twitch) and have by no…
Boring yet still very volatile.
I wonder if or when Rails will settle down and stop changing everything between major releases causing all documentation to be out of date, gems to break, developer habits to break, etc. Not to mention all of the related tooling like Bundler which seems to spit out new and uninteresting warnings and errors every time I update it.
It would be great to be able to write an application using a framework and not have to constantly change the application just to get long-term updates to the framework like bug fixes, security patches, compatibility with new versions of Ruby, etc.
Basically Rails-LTS but not from a 3rd-party (and embraced by the ecosystem).
Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth it?
#37I've yet to find anything that comes close to Rails in programmer productivity for the web. So, as long as programmer productivity is a concern, it's relevant. EDIT: On the other hand, I wouldn't choose Rails for a project where the main concern is performance/scalability
Try ASP.NET. It’s managed to take learn most of the lessons (what to avoid and what to replicate) from RoR and is built around a better language (C# or others of your choice) and environment (Visual Studio and MSDN) to boot.
Now that .NET with .NET Core is officially a first-class citizen on Linux, there really no good reason not to embrace it.
Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth it?
#38Much of what you learn in Ruby and Rails is not portable to other languages. Ruby and Rails are deeply flawed and much of what you learn is dealing with those flaws. Similar to learning PHP for example (but differently flawed than PHP). Ruby is also showing its age and is lagging behind modern languages. Rails is probably fine and fast and good for small projects. It is probably not good for professional large projec…
You should let AirBnb and GitHub know.
Oh, believe me, they know
Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth it?
#39Speaking for myself, and I tend to make practical choices for what I understand now. At the moment, I am not using Rails in my day to day work, and this is largely based on my past experiences.
Pros:
- easy enough to find libraries for most things I wanna do
- community likes testing, as do I
- community seems to focus on business & web implementations, so good for those use cases
- lots of questions for which I want answers already answered
- package management
- deployment to PaaS/Herorku-ish platforms pretty easy for smaller teams
- here in San Francisco, there are lots of job opportunities for Rails developers
- I like Ruby, even though I am less excited about OOP these days
Cons:
- Rails is magical & opinionated, and that always annoys me
- Figuring out where some method is coming from in a Rails object is often a pain
- In Elixir I almost never need a debugger, but in Ruby I almost always do
- loading Rails apps can get really slow, and learning to wait for software to boot isn't a skill I like to develop
- I feel more pressure "to do it" right when the time "to do it right" simply doesn't exist for reasons, because trying to come back and refactor gnarly Ruby code is just harder than it is in a compiled language
- Ruby has to be installed on the system to which an app is deployed, and needing to think about how to pre-install Ruby or how long a Ruby install takes is a mild pain (stand alone Go binaries or Elixir releases are pretty sweet)
Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth it?
#40Yes. Rails has by now certainly crossed into boring software territory – arguably a [positive thing]( http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology ) anyway – but it remains an excellent choice coming into 2018: - Out of the box, Rails has close to unbeatable developer ergonomics, tooling, stability, and ease of use - Lots of high quality, large companies use it (GitHub, Shopify, Airbnb, Square, Twitch) and have by no…
I don't think people understand that boring tech is where most of the jobs are