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Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth learning?

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

#51

Post by pcmoney »

Usual personal opinion caveats

Ok, simply rails is a tool. It is a well worn tool. Can do a lot of things and a lot of people know how to use it. Learning how to use it has been done many many times before so the path to competence is really smooth and straight forward.

I think it is worth learning because: 1) the community, you would be hard pressed to find a more diverse, welcoming, non-neck beard programming community. 2) resources, there are a lot of them. You will not encounter a problem that someone hasn’t solved for 3) fun, ruby is really nice and doesn’t fight you. Some features are debatable (meta programming, everything is an object, it’s GIL implementation etc) and I think all dynamic languages downsides are most noticeable in large code bases. But for your stated use case it’s great.

I strongly recommend the hartle rails tutorial. I convinced a friend to drop out of his math PhD and go through it. Do I think he will stay a rails programmer? No, but picking up python is a cinch after rails and there is no equivalently good python tutorial for teaching technical fluency in web dev that I am aware of.

Best of luck!!

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

#52

Post by hosh »

tptacek wrote: post #35
hosh wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React buys you two things: (1) reusable components (2) React Native https://thinkster.io/tutorials/what-exactly-is-react It's major criticism: there is a kernel of truth in the joke that React is a dressed-up PHP (in the sense of how you put the components together) Some other options are Vue and Elm.

It's been a long time since I wrote or even had to look at PHP, but I have done work in PHP. I use React constantly. I do not see any similarities between the two, like, at all.

Yeah, I was shocked when I first heard of it. But when I thought it about it, it makes sense: https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/58wmnz/so_reactjs_...

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

#53

Post by hosh »

hosh wrote: post #52
tptacek wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a long time since I wrote or even had to look at PHP, but I have done work in PHP. I use React constantly. I do not see any similarities between the two, like, at all.

Yeah, I was shocked when I first heard of it. But when I thought it about it, it makes sense: https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/58wmnz/so_reactjs_...

Here's another comment from that reddit thread:

"If you're at all familiar with the history of React, there's actually some amount of truth to this. React grew out of an internal PHP extension at Facebook called XHP. See the recent post describing React's history at https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2016/09/28/our-first-5... for more details."

"That said, the parallels only go so far. PHP is frequently rather unstructured, while React lends itself to some very specific structures. I don't think I'd necessarily say that PHP typically involves "recursively breaking down parts of the page". But sure, some similarities. (Then again, just about anything that involves template-ish work has some similarities... )"

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

#54

Post by brandall10 »

I was a Rails dev for the past 7 years, switched to a React position a couple months ago.

There was a lot of hand wringing a few years back that Rails was quickly losing popularity, but gauging by my recent time on the job market it is still very hot. It seems like I had just as many recruiters contacting me for Rails positions as they did React. I somewhat suspect this is because many people transitioned to other things and it's harder to find experienced devs.

As many others have stated it's a mature ecosystem and there's plenty of great learning material out there.

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

#55

Post by keynan »

The question isn't "is it worth learning" it's "is it worth learning next". What do you already know?

Focus on learning theory and standards (e.x. HTTP, websockets, MVC, security principals) and learning tools becomes easy enough you won't bother asking us if it's worth the time investment.

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

#56

Post by tptacek »

hosh wrote: post #53
hosh wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I was shocked when I first heard of it. But when I thought it about it, it makes sense: https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/58wmnz/so_reactjs_...

Here's another comment from that reddit thread: "If you're at all familiar with the history of React, there's actually some amount of truth to this. React grew out of an internal PHP extension at Facebook called XHP. See the recent post describing React's history at https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2016/09/28/our-first-5... for more details." "That said, the parallels only go so far. PHP is frequently rather uns…

That blog post section describes JSX, not React. JSX is just a notation.

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

#57

Post by bizkitgto »

joshmn wrote: post #3

Depends: * Do you like to be able to build things fast? * Do you prefer not having to reinvent the wheel? * Do you care if it's not the new hotness? If you answered no to any of those, run away! Rails is mature-ish. It's boring now. Its ecosystem is stable. Your sanity won't be tested. Reads... * Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial is probably the book you'll want to read to get a simple grasp on Rails (it can be overwhel…

Thanks for the recommendations!

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

#59

Post by dyeje »

briandear wrote: post #25
tptacek wrote: post #20

The answer is probably that parts of Rails are worth knowing, and other parts aren't. ActiveRecord and the Rails Controller/Model/Routing system are as good as anything in the serverside framework world. A few years back people might have started saying that AR was in danger of being obsoleted by "modern" databases, but SQL (and particularly Postgres) has come roaring back, and AR remains one of the best (arguably th…

Why React over rails front-end? It seems like it adds undue complication. What’s the real benefit? Basecamp works great and it’s a rails front end. Rails make full stack development pretty easy.

It really depends on the application. If you're making something that has a highly interactive UI, then React is a great tool for that. It doesn't have to be all or nothing though, you can use Rails server side rendering with React components for the complicated stuff. Basecamp is not a fair comparison, they use Stimulus which is their own frontend framework.

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

#60

Post by adetrest »

joshmn wrote: post #3

Depends: * Do you like to be able to build things fast? * Do you prefer not having to reinvent the wheel? * Do you care if it's not the new hotness? If you answered no to any of those, run away! Rails is mature-ish. It's boring now. Its ecosystem is stable. Your sanity won't be tested. Reads... * Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial is probably the book you'll want to read to get a simple grasp on Rails (it can be overwhel…

Is "rebuilding rails" still relevant? The website has a 2010-ish design vibe and it seems to talk about rails 3 being cutting age while we're now at rails 5. One image has (c) 2012.

Didnt know about the book, so I'm interested, but I can't tell if it's worth buying because of the above.

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