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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

#41

Post by EpicEng »

jasonpeacock wrote: post #33
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…

>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.

True, but I do my homework too. My code needs to be maintainable for the next guy. We can't invest inordinate amounts of time on V2 where it isn't necessary. I don't want unrelated parts of the program breaking because I fix a bug. The next set of features should be easy to implement from an architectural perspective. All of this is important to the customer and my business.

I care about my craft, but there's a line at which I stop investing my time in debating the toolset. If I'm spending ~10 hours / week writing blog and forum posts about why everyone should use X framework instead of Y I'm seriously wasting my time.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#42

Post by [deleted] »

fieryeagle wrote: post #18

I suppose this is how you gain fame these days, writing sensational counter-arguments instead of coding? Oh right, the author is a 'Ruby Activist', he couldn't help it. PHP has won, Node has won and now yet another language up to debate? Having something with its own niche and cult doesn't mean anything if it's not suitable for work. It does help populate shortcut-seeking approaches such as Heroku and more CRUD apps…

[deleted]

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#43

Post by bascule »

eropple wrote: post #39
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?

I've been using service objects / operations in my apps pretty consistently for half a decade, but that's a red herring. That statement is about using AR to query and manipulate data, which is orthogonal to a service layer. Service objects aren't going to fix the lack of optimistic/pessimistic locking in DataMapper.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#44

Post by dwd »

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…

I think the problem is no one seriously reads Hawryszkiewycz anymore.

Seems everyone's trying to squeeze problems into fitting their solution/framework rather the other way around.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#45

Post by smt88 »

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…

> Rails didn't beat PHP and Java for webdev because hipsters think it's cool.

I despise Ruby, PHP, and Java, but there is no objective argument that Ruby has "beaten" PHP or Java. It hasn't even beaten Python. It's tiny compared to the largest back-end languages.

Edit: evidence below:

- Ruby is used by 0 of the top 15 most-visited sites[1] (Twitter doesn't use it anymore). Java is used by 7 of them. PHP is used by 3.

- Job listings on Indeed asking for Ruby skills are far behind Java and PHP[2].

- W3Techs shows that 82.2% of all websites reporting their backend language are using PHP. Ruby is 0.6%.[3]

- Ruby is not even in the ballpark of Java on Github. It has a similar number of repos as PHP.[4]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_languages_used_in_...

2. http://www.codingdojo.com/blog/9-most-in-demand-programming-...

3. https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_langua...

4. http://githut.info/

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#46

Post by blub »

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…

Web development is a bit like runaway sexual selection, but instead of developing extravagant plumage, webdevs develop extravagant frameworks and strive to rewrite everything in JavaScript.

Blog posts are a way of status signaling but also of fitness signaling. People that have the capability of always learning new things and writing about them should be really good programmers while lower quality individuals can't afford to keep up and drop out of the game. Only the former are able to reliably secure mates and reproduce, thereby perpetuating the cycle.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#47

Post by singlow »

EpicEng wrote: post #36
themgt wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Part of the reason it matters more to web developers is that often our clients and employers do care what we use and if we love a particular tool it needs widespread adoption to be able to use it on real work. I have potential clients asking constantly if I can build their project with WordPress or Rails or Drupal or Symphony or whatever else they think is the best. It would be much better if they just came and asked if I could build it and let me help them determine what is the best platform for their project and pre-existing skill set.

Now, sometimes, they have a legitimate need to have it integrate with a larger system and using that tool has external advantages. But most of the time it is just a vague notion that if it is in WordPress it will be easy to use, cause you know, anyone can edit a WordPress site. But when you bolt a hundred plugins and custom business logic into WordPress, it makes no difference that it has any easy blog editor. That should have been a separate project to begin with. Half the time they have built 10% of what they need with a dozen plugins, think they are 90% done and that I can just make the rest of it work. This because someone told them there were plugins that could do everything they needed in WordPress and with WordPress they'd get good SEO.

The point is that if we want to use a particular tool, we better evangelize for it, because clients never want something built in a framework they haven't heard of. It's not even irrational for the clients, since 50% of the time their developers disappear before the project is done and they have to find someone else who can pick it up and finish.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#48

Post by ploxiln »

EpicEng wrote: post #36
themgt wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

That's all true, and I do "backend" stuff so I'm in the same boat as you, but I think you might still not get the point of the more-projects-faster thing:

To be competitive, web devs need to be working with the most popular framework, which has the most modules which are maintained (for stuff like "log in with facebook" or "publish photo to twitter" or "get weather for visitor's geo-ip location").

All this pre-packaged functionality does require some time to get familiar with, it's an ecosystem on top of a language with many DSLs.

So they need to make their team win, or join the winning team early. Or else they don't feel like they can compete.

It's a really big marketplace for web sites/apps out there, many small businesses get new-from-scratch websites every 2 years or less ... new shiny design drives consumer interest, it's not like they could afford for the old one to be maintainable anyway.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#49

Post by dave2000 »

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…

There are no hard problems in web design, other than that browsers are a really shitty platform for delivering software, and there's never been a concerted effort to start from scratch and solve it properly once. Just loads of proprietary solutions which are security nightmares and poorly supported, and endless frameworks.

Start again. Burn it all down, and do it properly this time.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#50

Post by nikdaheratik »

Bahamut wrote: post #22

"But I would never, ever, begin a new business that depends solely on Angular to survive. Why? Because Google doesn't need it. It didn't blink to give up GWT, it didn't have to think twice to decide to rewrite Angular 2 in an incompatible way to Angular 1, and so on." This is just wrong - almost 3/4 of Google's web apps depend on Angular from what I have heard from multiple Googlers. If a rare instance where an Angul…

I think you're probably right, but at the same time, Google does have a history of killing off projects for reasons that make sense to them but seem kind of arbitrary.

Of course, Angular is OSS and is likely to live on into obsolescence no matter what Google ends up doing with it.

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