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Personally, I write Go professionally and I love the simplicity and the absence of many dependencies. That said, Active Record and Active Job seem to do exactly what I write manually over and over again in Go due to having no frameworks.
Is Rails still that good?
Also it is true that Rails and Ruby are having a renaissance and the technical direction for both seems to me a good bet for the future.
Used RoR back in the day and it's a great way to get stuff out the door. I coded like I was on fire. I've never had that sensation since then doing JS/TS/React blah-blah.
If you're doing a startup, your goal (I presume) is to validate your assumptions and get customers.
If it takes off you could always rewrite the backend in Go (which will buy you lots of time) and think of the frontend at a later date.
Remember 95% (odd) startups fail, so think about failing as fast as possible.
It has good documentation.
The code base is stable.
There are mature libraries.
It is practical to learn Rails.
Sure there are very good reasons not to choose Rails, but the current year is not one of them.
And the work of building any new business...let alone a startup is approximately the same no matter which technologies you choose (modulo your expertise).
Time spent researching web frameworks postpones building the potentially money printing mechanism. When your research is done, you still won't have built anything.
If you are lucky enough to grow, you will be constantly rebuilding your systems. Unless you are Telegram. They used Erlang. It has the same features as Rails except for a large pool of practitioners. Good luck.
There is a large base of competent Rails practitioners. It has good documentation. The code base is stable. There are mature libraries. It is practical to learn Rails. Sure there are very good reasons not to choose Rails, but the current year is not one of them. And the work of building any new business...let alone a startup is approximately the same no matter which technologies you choose (modulo your expertise). Ti…
I mean, the Go way of as few dependencies as possible and no opinionated frameworks is cool, but getting so much done for you is such a nice thing when you want to build fast. Also, switching to a purely REST API with just render json: is unbelievably fast. Writing the same in Go would include a lot of boilerplate.
Anyway, thanks for your response. I am really happy for Ruby, RoR, and the community.
Yes Rails is still good and IMHO Rails is still an amazing choice for a startup allowing you to do rapid iterations and focus on business logic. Also it is true that Rails and Ruby are having a renaissance and the technical direction for both seems to me a good bet for the future.
I have always been very protective of Go and its minimalism, no huge frameworks like Django/RoR/Laravel (well, there are a few, but they aren't that popular or mainstream since the Go community favors just using the standard library).
However, the more I read about startups and prototyping, the more I think that spending time on boilerplate, writing custom migration scripts, and implementing database-backed job queues every single time is not what you want to spend your time on when you want to iterate as quickly as possible.
Also, another minor factor in favor of Ruby is the talks on destroyallsoftware such as "Functional core, imperative shell" and "Boundaries" where the author uses and seems to really like the language :)
On top of that, learning a new language/framework is always fun so I have already starting playing around with the official RoR guide.
There is a large base of competent Rails practitioners. It has good documentation. The code base is stable. There are mature libraries. It is practical to learn Rails. Sure there are very good reasons not to choose Rails, but the current year is not one of them. And the work of building any new business...let alone a startup is approximately the same no matter which technologies you choose (modulo your expertise). Ti…
I just opened the official starting guide from the official RoR website and am very excited, to be honest. I mean, the Go way of as few dependencies as possible and no opinionated frameworks is cool, but getting so much done for you is such a nice thing when you want to build fast. Also, switching to a purely REST API with just render json: is unbelievably fast. Writing the same in Go would include a lot of boilerpla…
the Go way of as few dependencies as possible and no opinionated frameworks
That is highly opinionated and the opinion is based on Google’s business model, resources, operational strategies and engineering wherewithal. No startup has anything like any of them.
The tech stack isn’t likely to be the deciding factor for a startup being successful these days. Pick whatever you or the team works best with.