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Today I accept that Rails is yesterday’s software

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Re: Today I accept that Rails is yesterday’s software

#71

Post by petepete »

askyourmother wrote: post #20
icpmacdo wrote: post #18

I am thinking about completely stopping reading Hacker News. I enjoy the community a lot but every time I am learning something new I read about how its old and shitty and will cause hair loss when you try and invest any time in it. It puts the breaks on actually learning with the distraction of going and trying to find that new ambiguous stack that the author is hinting at.

If you learn a library, you will always be in the driving seat. If you learn a framework, well, better buckle up, because it is a bumpy ride. Frameworks are like hamburgers at maccy ds - consumption for the masses, no thinking required. Later in life those decisions can be a problem.

Given the choice between hand-rearing cattle and growing wheat versus buying a ready-made burger, well, it depends on whether you want to eat slightly less well, sooner or slightly better, later.

Re: Today I accept that Rails is yesterday’s software

#73

Post by crdoconnor »

polysaturate wrote: post #9

I…don’t understand the point of the article? Ok Ruby is duck typed and has a dynamic runtime. It has for…all of the time since it was created. Rails has magic… since…all of the time since it was created. I’m not even defending Ruby or Rails here. Use at your own benefit/risk…as with every other programming language and framework.

The emphasis on magic was a particularly bad decision. It looked wonderful in the original screencasts that let you build a webapp in 5 minutes. It causes terrible pain when you're trying to do something complicated.

This was one of the mistakes Django made and - to their credit - got over relatively quickly. It began as a kind of imitation of Rails but they stripped out the magic pretty quickly and made it a lot more explicit.

Re: Today I accept that Rails is yesterday’s software

#75

Post by crdoconnor »

geebee wrote: post #69
calcsam wrote: post #5

Being "yesterday's software" is a necessary step. It's the final part of the Gartner hype cycle: maturity. https://speakerdeck.com/tehviking/surviving-the-framework-hy...

Yep! Nothing wrong with yesterday's technology if you're solving yesterday's problems! I don't mean that in a sarcastic or glib way, most of your problems really are yesterday's problems. Or even yesteryear's problems…. now that I think of it, when I depart from rails in a rails project (which is common), it's usually to use raw sql, unix, various networking protocols, or other programming languages that predate rail…

ORMs get a lot of undeserved flak for being considered "training wheels for SQL" but they can save you from writing an awful lot of boilerplate code.

Re: Today I accept that Rails is yesterday’s software

#76

Post by zxcvcxz »

icpmacdo wrote: post #18

I am thinking about completely stopping reading Hacker News. I enjoy the community a lot but every time I am learning something new I read about how its old and shitty and will cause hair loss when you try and invest any time in it. It puts the breaks on actually learning with the distraction of going and trying to find that new ambiguous stack that the author is hinting at.

I feel the same.

Plus I hate the forced corporate atmosphere. I've noticed anyone with strong philosophical opinions on software are typically shunned in favor of the corporate narrative.

I feel like a couple of years ago HN had a pretty diverse culture when it came to OS and software stacks, the past few months it seems EVERYONE is shoving corporate shit down my throat: VSCode, "Bash on Linux", Azure, TypeScript, Windows 10, and don't forget real programmers spend 90% of their time editing decades old MSWord files so they can't possibly go without MS office.

If it has a big corporation behind it HN will shove it down your throat, if it's a small open source project HN will circlejerk around it like it's the next big thing, if it's an OSS project that threatens some big corporate project you can bet money that HN will shit all over it.

Re: Today I accept that Rails is yesterday’s software

#77

Post by mnarayan01 »

There's certainly a lot of truth in this (I especially like the duck-typing image), but the example feels like it throws it all away. You can, after all, have a _super_ fast and simple asset pipeline by keeping things...simple (to say nothing of skipping it entirely); having CoffeeScript compiling to JavaScript is not really relevant to either Ruby or Rails.

Re: Today I accept that Rails is yesterday’s software

#78

Post by mtkd »

calcsam wrote: post #5

Being "yesterday's software" is a necessary step. It's the final part of the Gartner hype cycle: maturity. https://speakerdeck.com/tehviking/surviving-the-framework-hy...

Welcome perspective

After 30+ years of coding, my first encounter with Rails, a summer morning I received a ripped draft of a very early book on it remains one of the seminal moments of my career - so many elegant solutions to so many issues I'd grappled with since the mid-90s

As with any tool it's got some quirks and areas I could criticise - but it's got a place in my toolkit and will have for some time

Re: Today I accept that Rails is yesterday’s software

#79

Post by crdoconnor »

zippergz wrote: post #21

Honest question. What technology are people enjoying on the server-side with sites built in React or Angular? I've seen some of these done with Rails, and some done with Node, neither of which I personally enjoy a whole lot. (Note, I'm not making an argument that either are BAD - just that I don't really like working with them). I'm curious to hear what other people are having success with in production.

Django has always been relatively pleasant for me to develop in. Flask has been okay too.

I almost learned Rails in 2007 when it was at the peak of its hype cycle but after reading a series of (not very well publicized) tirades about pain that Rails' magic caused I learned Django instead.

I think node is at the peak of its hype cycle right now.

Re: Today I accept that Rails is yesterday’s software

#80

Post by brhays »

dopamean wrote: post #23
mooreds wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you, that was a wonderful slide deck.

Brandon is a really awesome guy. His talks are always funny and informative.

I don't often visit Hacker News, but when I do, it's to receive compliments.

But srsly, thank you, that's very kind to say.

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