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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

#51

Post by bbcbasic »

blub wrote: post #46
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 a…

The true alpha of the group will build his or her own framework or transpiler.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#52

Post by nikdaheratik »

vonklaus wrote: post #40
pjmlp wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.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…

1. My beginners class in Uni taught Java for the 101/102 sequence, so as far as that goes you can use it to implement most beginners projects just fine. It even compiles to something if you want to deal with that experience.

2. I'd say the set of programs can be pretty sparse in that it doesn't tend to play well with its native computer environments (partially be design), so it's more work to generate stuff with a GUI, somewhat more work to handle CLI programs (but not that much more), and it has an interesting set of web tools that have hopefully been updated in the 8+ years since I played with them.

3. I have no idea what Google is doing, but it doesn't matter as Java will live a very long life in Enterprise land if nothing else.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#53

Post by davidgl »

blub wrote: post #46
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 a…

What a great comment, I wish I could up vote this 1000 times !

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#54

Post by greenleafjacob »

vonklaus wrote: post #6

I haven't used rails in about 3 years (when I first started programming) and I only built 1 application which was a super shitty weekend instagram clone that didn't really work well. I didn't want to use rails anymore because it didn't feel like programming and nodeJS was getting hot. The thing is, I knew fuck all about programming then and now, I have the luxury of knowing very slightly less than fuck all. Which giv…

> erlang/elixir: Never used this, but seems ideal for highly scalable concurrent architecture and highly scalable process choreography.

Erlang's primary reason for existence is fault tolerance. High concurrency and scalability is just a bonus. Consider hot code reloading, supervision trees, links and monitors, D/ETS and Mnesia, location-agnostic message passing. These have nothing to do with scalability. You use Erlang when you absolutely have to have the system continue to work 24/7/365 in perpetuity even in the presence of software errors.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#55

Post by pbowyer »

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 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.

Because writing web apps / CRUD apps is soul-destroying, boring, and always perceived by the client as easy (no matter how much business value they bring) so there's pressure to do them fast, as others have said. Any distraction is welcome, and any framework that makes the task less painful is welcome.

Both of which foster this fairly pointless set of discussions :)

32 year old curmudgeon here, in the middle of a large web app project...

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#56

Post by tluyben2 »

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 work in embedded, web & app dev and for web or app dev, by far most customers really don't care what it is written in. They care about the end result only. So we can use whatever is the closest to the endresult already and that's not often something like Rails. More often than not it is actually Wordpress; someone in this thread mentions web projects are more often <100 hours than years (for embedded we think in years, web/apps in 1-3 months) that's why WP is working; our clients do not actually care about maintainability because it's a quick write and will be thrown away / replaced when it served it's purpose.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#57

Post by ben_jones »

educar wrote: post #25
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…

> 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 Angular release failure occurs, it shuts down Google's development process dramatically & costs millions in productivity. So you were quick to call somebody wrong based on complete heresay? Do you have any conclusive proof that they use it? Gmail? Analytics?

Literally 5 seconds of Googling [1]. Turns out the app that allows Google's Ad customers (i.e. their main source of revenue) to use the Google platform is written in angular. It's also one of the oldest and largest Angular apps in existence.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62RvRQuMVyg

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#58

Post by rvense »

mastazi wrote: post #17
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…

Language/framework fads are just that, momentary fads. I believe that, in the long term, things like good architecture, sane dependency management, well-managed life cycle (which includes provisioning and deployment) are far more important than the language/framework you are using. You may not like PHP, for example, but I would still choose to work on a good quality PHP project than a bad one in the latest flashy lan…

I don't know. I just ripped out basically half the rug under my Scala app and put in a new one without the rest even noticing. It's not a very good architecture I don't think, but because of flashy language features like generics that are often dismissed as unimportant or even an impediment "in the real world", I was able to change a core part of the code that basically everything else touches and still be sure that everything works exactly as before once the code compiles again.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#59

Post by scotty79 »

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 doesn't have many hard problems. It has one serious though. How not to get tangled in your own mess when customer is breathing down your neck.

Almost every language provides you with sufficient tools for writing algorithms, doing calculations, storing and accessing data, but almost none gives you solutions for avoiding mess.

There are many ideas on how to avoid mess but none of them works and people are left to their own devices to figure out how not to get lost.

That's why webdevelopers are so fascinated with frameworks. They promise solution to their one hard problem. And some even deliver it to a degree.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#60

Post by matt4077 »

blub wrote: post #46
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 a…

And this rambling indecision of an article kinda leaves me staring into the distance, rethinking some priorities.
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