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Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

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Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#31

Post by EpicEng »

force_reboot wrote: post #30
EpicEng wrote: post #26

I'm sure I'm going to get piled on here, but whatever. I don't understand why those who spend most of their time writing web apps / CRUD apps focus so much on the tools they use to do it. "This framework's the best!" "No, this one is obviously better!" "My design pattern is better than your design pattern!" I don't know, maybe I'm a 32 year old curmudgeon, but I just don't see this in my area. I work at a lower level…

Let me explain. You are looking from the outside at a community which has a lot of issues around languages, tooling and frameworks for complex historical and technical reasons. E.g. Things that developed over long periods of time, like desktop apps, had to be rebuilt in the browser in a decade. Ask any desktop application developer how fun they think client side web dev is in comparison. And you are then assuming tha…

>Hope that clarifies things

No, not really, and I don't think I assumed that at all. I think it is objectively true that debating the merits of e.g. Python v Ruby for years on end is an utter waste of time. This is not engineering, it's vanity. I can get behind the occasional spirited debate. Of course there are pros and cons to every tool, and we should know what those are, but at the end of the day that's all they are; tools. They're middle men in the problem solving process, not the end result.

BTW, your current web protocols and frameworks are going to change again, just like your decrepit old desktop technologies did. Be prepared to denounce your current toolset and fervently embrace another in the near future.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#32

Post by themgt »

EpicEng wrote: post #26

I'm sure I'm going to get piled on here, but whatever. I don't understand why those who spend most of their time writing web apps / CRUD apps focus so much on the tools they use to do it. "This framework's the best!" "No, this one is obviously better!" "My design pattern is better than your design pattern!" I don't know, maybe I'm a 32 year old curmudgeon, but I just don't see this in my area. I work at a lower level…

What is the average number of hours you spend on a given project? Honestly I think part of the reliance and importance placed on frameworks is that a lot of web dev (especially contract/freelance work) is still relatively small projects, stuff between 10-100 hours of work.

So you're almost never spending 99% of your time solving unsolved, hard problems. You're building custom solutions to relatively common but special-snowflake problems. And in that context, you need a framework because in effect you're building a 1000 hour project but only spending 40 hours doing some configuration, customization and polish on top of a framework. Could you spend 1000 hours and build something from scratch and forget a framework? Sure, but no one wants to pay for that. So the framework you use is the giant's shoulders you stand on.

Rails didn't beat PHP and Java for webdev because hipsters think it's cool. It's because developers delivered projects better and faster with Rails, because it lets you spend less time re-solving the same solved problems which still comprise a lot of modern web development.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#33

Post by jasonpeacock »

EpicEng wrote: post #26

I'm sure I'm going to get piled on here, but whatever. I don't understand why those who spend most of their time writing web apps / CRUD apps focus so much on the tools they use to do it. "This framework's the best!" "No, this one is obviously better!" "My design pattern is better than your design pattern!" I don't know, maybe I'm a 32 year old curmudgeon, but I just don't see this in my area. I work at a lower level…

FTFY: "I don't understand why those who spend most of their time __using tools__ focus so much on the tools they use to do it."

It should be more self-evident now.

When there are many tools which meet the minimum requirements for doing a job, then the focus becomes not on which tool can do the job, but which tool you feel does the job the best (or you enjoy using). Carpenters argue about the best saws/drills, artists argue about the best brushes/paints, musicians argue about the best instrument maker.

You're right, customers don't care about what tool was used to build something, but they care that you can do your job well and good tools help you do that.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#34

Post by dragonwriter »

kinkdr wrote: post #5

Nice read. I understand the sentiment but I find the "win declaration" a bit too weird. How can one say "Rails won"? It's not like people will stop making web frameworks. Like any other software it will eventually be made obsolete by something newer and better. Maybe I am just nitpicking.

Rails won the past. There's a lot of legacy in it that's impractical to replace, which guarantees a sizable community, which makes it viable for new projects, if not always ideal, for quite some time.

It's become what J2EE was when Rails was new. Decades from now, even if it's completely fallen out of favor for new development, there'll be people getting paid handsomely to maintain legacy Rails apps. It's won an important spot in history.

But technology moves on. And just as the Java stack dominant when Rails emerged has lost ground to Rails, other non-Java stacks, and even newer Java stacks, is wire likely Rails will lose ground to other Ruby and non-Ruby stacks.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#35

Post by pjmlp »

vonklaus wrote: post #19
davidpatrick wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you are just trying to justify your decision for Node. I use Node and Rails in production for different products/services. They both serve different purposes well. "Going away" was said about .NET and PHP and they don't seem to be going anywhere, albeit they are less popular than they use to be. Too many discussions on HN have this paranoia lurking around of whether or not "I chose the right path". I f…

Again, I am not trying to justify my decision, I think if you asked most developers to give advice to a kid learning programming 3 years ago how to get started(with the benefit of 3 years glance into the future) they would probably lean towards node if it was between nodejs v ruby. However, I totally agree that the longer life of a product exposes the weaknesses of any language/framework. and there are multiple paths…

.NET is alive and well.

Enterprise only cares about Java and .NET as standard backend stacks, regardless of the technology of the day HN posts how everyone is doing Go and node.js.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#36

Post by EpicEng »

themgt wrote: post #32
EpicEng wrote: post #26

I'm sure I'm going to get piled on here, but whatever. I don't understand why those who spend most of their time writing web apps / CRUD apps focus so much on the tools they use to do it. "This framework's the best!" "No, this one is obviously better!" "My design pattern is better than your design pattern!" I don't know, maybe I'm a 32 year old curmudgeon, but I just don't see this in my area. I work at a lower level…

What is the average number of hours you spend on a given project? Honestly I think part of the reliance and importance placed on frameworks is that a lot of web dev (especially contract/freelance work) is still relatively small projects, stuff between 10-100 hours of work. So you're almost never spending 99% of your time solving unsolved, hard problems. You're building custom solutions to relatively common but specia…

>What is the average number of hours you spend on a given project?

That's a fair point; my project plans are usually measured in years, not hours. Of course there is ongoing maintenance, but that's not where I spend most of my time.

I didn't mean to imply that tools aren't important, or that we shouldn't care. We absolutely should care, and I do as well. The difference is that I don't feel the need to spend copious amounts of time defending my tools, or debating their merits with other people who will never agree with me.

I evaluate them, use them, and move on. They are an integral part of my process, but not nearly as important as building something that solves real problems.

It's the same old issue of religion v enthusiasm, belief v fanaticism. That line gets crossed too often and it's just a waste. I think some lose sight of what's important.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#37

Post by raarts »

EpicEng wrote: post #31
force_reboot wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me explain. You are looking from the outside at a community which has a lot of issues around languages, tooling and frameworks for complex historical and technical reasons. E.g. Things that developed over long periods of time, like desktop apps, had to be rebuilt in the browser in a decade. Ask any desktop application developer how fun they think client side web dev is in comparison. And you are then assuming tha…

>Hope that clarifies things No, not really, and I don't think I assumed that at all. I think it is objectively true that debating the merits of e.g. Python v Ruby for years on end is an utter waste of time. This is not engineering, it's vanity. I can get behind the occasional spirited debate. Of course there are pros and cons to every tool, and we should know what those are, but at the end of the day that's all they…

I think it 's because of the number of young/unexperienced developers in the field. Those are the ones spending (wasting) a lot of time debating the relative merits of frameworks, languages, editors. More experienced people don't care as much.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#38

Post by hliyan »

EpicEng wrote: post #26

I'm sure I'm going to get piled on here, but whatever. I don't understand why those who spend most of their time writing web apps / CRUD apps focus so much on the tools they use to do it. "This framework's the best!" "No, this one is obviously better!" "My design pattern is better than your design pattern!" I don't know, maybe I'm a 32 year old curmudgeon, but I just don't see this in my area. I work at a lower level…

As a 36 year old curmudgeon, I agree. I think the overabundance of framework/tool choices is resulting in decision paralysis. The C++ world doesn't (or at least it didn't) have this problem -- there's usually few standard ways to do something and it takes a only a few minutes to pick one. The rest of developer energies are spent on actual implementation.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#39

Post by eropple »

bascule wrote: post #27

I've been using Rails for a decade now, across many jobs, and one thing I've experienced fairly consistently is the worst Ruby web apps I have ever dealt with are the ones that weren't written in Rails. I've both seen and spent a lot of time rewriting overgrown Sinatra monstrosities with assorted non-AR ORMs. These apps were generally riddled with XSS since they didn't handle escaping correctly, often had unmaintaina…

> AR is the only one I've used that's both expressive enough to cover all the cases I'm interested in

Have you never worked on a system big enough to need a service layer?

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#40

Post by vonklaus »

pjmlp wrote: post #35
vonklaus wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, I am not trying to justify my decision, I think if you asked most developers to give advice to a kid learning programming 3 years ago how to get started(with the benefit of 3 years glance into the future) they would probably lean towards node if it was between nodejs v ruby. However, I totally agree that the longer life of a product exposes the weaknesses of any language/framework. and there are multiple paths…

.NET is alive and well. Enterprise only cares about Java and .NET as standard backend stacks, regardless of the technology of the day HN posts how everyone is doing Go and node.js.

i actually have been interested in Java because apache has open sourced what seems to be the best collection of resources on the internet and they are almost entirely written in java for the java ecosystem. I also think I would learn a massive amount. I also am strongly considering Java and less strongly C. What are your thoughts on Java in terms of:

* How much it would teach me about programming/software design, e.g. just as a general learning excercise?

* What does Java lend itself best to/is a typical set of programs a beginner could build after say 1 month?

* Is google planning on phasing Java out and using Go?

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