131–140 of 166 posts
It's not Rails. Web software development in general has simply plateaued across the board. We're out of new frontiers to innovate around and the work from now on is about playing custodian to the innovations of the past. Unless something spectacularly interesting comes along, the priorities of the web are now all about supporting what's already been built. Either by maintaining something hastily built and cracking at…
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.
For any given technology which manages to take off at all, there's generally at least a ten year span during which some groups of early adopters are calling it "old and busted" and moving on, while other people are just discovering the "new hotness" and piling in. Just because this guy has switched from one group to the other doesn't mean you need to follow him; if the technology is good and meets your needs then hey, take it on, it'll be great.
The other thing that happens is... well, most of what this article is talking about has nothing to do with technology in the first place; it's more about the community built around that technology, and the fact that the author no longer feels like that community is going in a direction compatible with his needs.
I'm not part of the ruby community at all so maybe he's right and the "roadmap for rails is bleak" - but I'd bet that it's really more that it has developed further but not in a way that suits this author's needs, so he feels disappointed and alienated from the community, and he is observing that he and the rails community are drifting apart and will soon get divorced.
This says nothing whatsoever about the compatibility of the current rails community's direction with your direction, and it makes no useful predictions about the future development of the rails technology and its potential compatibility with your needs. It could be that the same forces driving this author away from rails are the ones which have brought it to your attention as something worth learning about and investing in.
I perfer static typed languages now (not only because of Grails and Groovy). And I prefer to compose some specialized frameworks. For example JAX-RS (Jersey) is a very good REST framework. There is no need to force the user to use it with a certain ORM (if at all), a certain way to validate objects and so on. Just take what fit's best. Java is not the most elegant or productive language but there are other static typed JVM languages like Kotlin or Scala.
To come back to the article: I don't think that we need new languages, but another way to use existing frameworks and maybe statically typed languages.
That might all matter if the first thing people did once deploying it was to port off of it. For software that has such a rapid expiration date, none of it selling points matter. You might as well have written it in php or perl.
Rails continues to be a favorite joke of mine.
I remember early Rails, around 0.13, pre RC, the community was small the future seemed bright. Little did we know the horrors of what it would turn into. Most of the professional people left when they saw the security circus, the endless holes and design flaws. I learnt then - avoid any web framework which has pragprog pushing a book behind it. The new one to avoid because the masses are already circling around it is…
Author here. Hawking a book? Are you kidding me? I'm also the creator of Phoenix. I spent two years of my life outside of a FT job to get Phoenix to 1.0. We started a book because first class learning materials outside of the basic online guides is necessary on any platform. I make $3/copy from the book sales, so "hawking" a book does a disservice to me because if this was about money, I wouldn't have spent 8 months…
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Getting to market quickly is often more important than contemplating about handling Twitter like traffic. Also, I haven't heard of an application that never had to be rewritten partially/optimised after X years in production. Some problems just don't present themselves in the first couple of years.
Your statement is too cautious. At the start of a project, getting to market quickly is VIRTUALLY ALWAYS more important than handling Twitter-scale traffic. People are simultaneously confident their idea will be popular and afraid of failure, so we have a strong tendency to over-engineer for scale. If it does scale, don't be surprised if you have to toss out your v1 and rebuild. The difference between a good framewor…
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Nails it. There's nothing shameful in using a "boring, not cool" platform to get work done. The pioneer lifestyle is full of risks. Sometimes you want that excitement, other times you have different priorities.
Sometimes you want to read the article.
But no, fixing stuff is hard. Let's write bitchy blog posts and blame everyone else.
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Ruby's got a lot of software that's been produced over the years, and one of the risks here is that people burn out on projects and move on. A slow accumulation of dangerous deadwood occurs over time and unless people work to clear the brush it can be catastrophic when problems strike. Consider: ImageMagick and OpenSSL. Newer platforms haven't had this problem because they've already broken all their old software (Ru…
Ruby gems in particular host a lot of abandonware and basically little turds that entice "I read pragprog, watch screencasts, and am now leet Rails dev!" Folks into using them with the promise of easy Lego style coding. It never ends well.
People get hyped about any language the same way. How many Erlang "experts" or Node.js "ninjas" are there out there? Give it a rest. If people want to get excited about something don't shit all over them.
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Here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MojR1XUEc0 As an aside, how do people consume slide decks? It doesn't seem as interesting without the associated lecture...
Decks are only consumable if they have: 1. extensive speaker notes included as an addendum 2. all of the content on the slides (which usually makes for a bad presentation) Some presenters will have 2 versions of their decks -- one minimal version for the presentation, and one extended or enhanced version for later reference.