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

Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth it?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 80 posts

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth it?

#51

Post by mrgordon »

stevebmark wrote: post #17

Much 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…

What web dev languages/frameworks aren’t deeply flawed and teach you more portable skills?

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth it?

#52

Post by mmartinson »

_d8fd wrote: post #39

Speaking 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…

I feel like figuring out where a method is coming from to be a routine source of tedium and a massive gumption trap when working on Ruby projects. This, along with bugs rooted in hidden state mutations, far overshadows the time saving conveniences in Ruby and Rails for me.

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth it?

#54

Post by stevebmark »

mrgordon wrote: post #51
stevebmark wrote: post #17

Much 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…

What web dev languages/frameworks aren’t deeply flawed and teach you more portable skills?

Unfortunately I would say Javascript. Unlike Ruby, you will learn about compilers, static analysis, linting (eslint is more useful than rubocop), type systems, function composition, and have a good alternative to OO based programing built into the language (as opposed to your `UnboundMethod` lambda block proc whateverthehell design flaw Ruby has now). Javascript also gives you decent jumping off points into languages you will learn more from (Elm, Purescript).

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth it?

#55

Post by dizzystar »

yedpodtrzitko wrote: post #28

I'm not Rubyist, but when I see an article about RoR it's one of these: "I just started using Ruby and omg it's out-of-box everything, rapid development, monkeypatching makes everything super easy, it's like second Jesus coming." and the second category is this: "I am working with RoR for years, maintaining/migrating anything is super painful, because everyone is monkeypatching everything, so you cant safely touch an…

gem install hairball

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth it?

#56

Post by gkya »

jeffnappi wrote: post #44
foodstances wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 usi…

Volatile in comparison to what exactly?

Django. I'm not doing software these days but still following the news etc., and it seems to me that the general knowledge of the tool is still operable since very early releases. I'm not very familiar with Rails itself but when an environment changes very quickly it's both a big distraction and a great inconvenience. I've last worked with django around January 2014, today when I look at a Django app it's the same beast but a bit better. I was also interested in node in its first days, then about 0.12 I lost my interest. Each time I look at it it's a new thing. If Rails is more like node than Django, that's a problem for a beginner, as they'd rather spend time learning fundamentals of web dev rather than learning a breaking change every month.

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth it?

#57

Post by eximius »

danmaz74 wrote: post #29
eximius wrote: post #8

No. What does rails have that a different python framework doesn't have? And you'll save yourself the tears of migrating later.

Why would you need to migrate to Python later? I can understand needing to migrate to something more performant/easy to scale, but Python doesn't have any advantage on Ruby in that department.

Not migrate to python, migration away from Rails. I'm suggesting Python as an alternative to Rails to start with.

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth it?

#58

Post by mod »

touchofevil wrote: post #23
mod wrote: post #18

Earlier 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!

Learning Ruby would give you a big leg up over starting from scratch learning Python.

I don't know if you are familiar with any programming languages at all, but many skills translate cross-language...the paradigms are the same. Particularly with Ruby & Python which are very similar languages. They're good at the same things, by and large.

Taking your Ruby skills over to Python will be a matter of "google: [python thing] in ruby".

For a specific example, Python has a unique thing called "list comprehensions". Using that google string you can get some great ideas about replicating that functionality in Ruby.

Anyway, on a grander scale, picking up new languages is the easy part of programming--even when they're not so similar.

Best of luck!

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth it?

#59

Post by amorphid »

mmartinson wrote: post #52
_d8fd wrote: post #39

Speaking 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…

I feel like figuring out where a method is coming from to be a routine source of tedium and a massive gumption trap when working on Ruby projects. This, along with bugs rooted in hidden state mutations, far overshadows the time saving conveniences in Ruby and Rails for me.

When I have creative freedom, I use Rails for routing, serving requests, and talking to the DB. I try to not to lean too heavily on Rails for business logic stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth it?

#60

Post by [deleted] »

mmartinson wrote: post #52
_d8fd wrote: post #39

Speaking 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…

I feel like figuring out where a method is coming from to be a routine source of tedium and a massive gumption trap when working on Ruby projects. This, along with bugs rooted in hidden state mutations, far overshadows the time saving conveniences in Ruby and Rails for me.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN