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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

#81

Post by Qworg »

infinii wrote: post #75
EpicEng wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Your project plan is measured in years? All the orange crops just froze over from the chills running down the backs of all the Agile\Lean practitioners.

Turns out that it is very hard to deliver any hardware project in a purely Agile environment - it lacks the capability for careful delivery of long lead time/critical path items, as well as failing to neatly fit into a sprint.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#82

Post by gohrt »

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…

It's certainly a luxury to not have to think about malicious input from the world wide web, and be able to try any tool you want and just try again if it misbehaves -- it won't empty your users' bank accounts.

> 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.

> We worry about what technologies we use for a given task as far as it impacts our design goals

I don't see the difference.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#83

Post by andybak »

collyw wrote: post #69
singlow wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, it made me smile when a non-technical friend had narrowed down the choice of languages for the project he wanted to build. "Python, Java or " Python and Java are relatively opposite ends of the web dev spectrum, and he didn't code so it was likely based on rants from the programmers around him. In the end his project failed because he couldn't find any Django devs to continue the project for a relatively low wa…

We're a small Django shop and I do weigh up this when deciding if we're the best option for a prospective client. If we build them a site then there is a maintenance cost that is potentially higher than there would be with a PHP site.

Of course - the counter-argument is "a good PHP dev is no cheaper and just as hard to find" but for maintenance tasks you might only need an average (or even mediocre) dev - and it's a hell of a lot easier to find an average PHP dev than an average (insert less popular choice here) dev.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#84

Post by lmm »

EpicEng wrote: post #41
jasonpeacock wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 shoul…

> 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.

Sure, but that line is in a different place depending on how important the tools are. If you're doing a project where the functionality is 40% custom code and 60% tooling, that will naturally give you a very different attitude to a project where the functionality is 1% custom code and 99% tooling.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#85

Post by rgbrgb »

scotty79 wrote: post #59
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 a…

> Web development doesn't have many hard problems. It has one serious though.

Kind of a strange way to put it but I think I agree with the gist. Scaling is the web's hard problem. Building an ever expanding list of features while measuring if users like them and delivering them via cheap computers and tiny pipes is surprisingly difficult. Scaling a rigidly defined web system on it's own generally isn't so hard at this point. One off Twitter clones with a few of T's killer features can be knocked out in a few days with pretty good load scaling properties. But scaling the codebase and architecture from 1 dev, 0 users, and 1 OK feature to XXX users and YYY features users love is really hard to get right. Ideally the 100th feature is as easy as the 10th and you can just add more engineer hours, but more commonly it seems to get exponentially harder to add features as the codebase expands.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#86

Post by pedalpete »

busterarm wrote: post #64
smt88 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

As a Ruby developer who gets paid to work with PHP daily, the reason 82.2% of all websites report a PHP backend is because 82.2% of all websites can only afford a PHP backend. PHP developer salaries lag well behind market average for pretty much the same skillset. The tooling around PHP on the web is a wreck because you get what you pay for. Java isn't that much different -- I see tons of Java jobs I don't want in NY…

Don't forget the huge number of those 82.2% (is that made up on the spot) websites are likely built on wordpress as well.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#87

Post by vidarh »

busterarm wrote: post #61
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…

I used Sequel once on a major project and as nice as it was, there was major pain. Pain I wouldn't have had with ActiveRecord. I seriously would have gotten the job done in half the time, with less problems had I just used Rails...and I've written my own ORMs before - I have somewhat of a clue.

I'm curious what pain you experienced with Sequel, as I have the exact opposite experience.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#88

Post by neppo »

smt88 wrote: post #45
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…

> 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.…

> Ruby is used by 0 of the top 15 most-visited sites

The majority of projects are not the next twitter or facebook, but something with a limited scope to be done as fast as possible

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#89

Post by vidarh »

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…

They are tools, but some tools are more enjoyable for people to work with than others (and we don't agree on which ones), and when you're spending a substantial percentage of your life working with those tools, then working with something you enjoy matters.

For some, the tools they work with doesn't matter or doesn't affect their enjoyment. Great for them. But for me it does. Working in a language or with a framework I don't like is a constant stress factor because I keep hitting things that annoy me.

Personally, I don't touch Python projects if I can avoid it, for example, because I don't enjoy working with Python. It's got nothing to do with objective issues with it, and everything to do with subjective issues that affect my enjoyment. If I work with something I enjoy, I will be more motivated and put in a better effort, and will overall be happier.

> Be prepared to denounce your current toolset and fervently embrace another in the near future.

Awesome. While I like my current stack, I've changed it many times during my career because I found something I liked better. And sometimes I've had to put my preferences aside and pick something for more pragmatic reasons, and that's ok, but I most of the time have the luxury of being able to turn down work if I don't thnk I'll enjoy it.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#90

Post by forkerenok »

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…

Your nickname rings the bell. Aren't you https://github.com/tarcieri ?

If so the "tl; dr:" sounds strange considering your celluloid-based eco-system.

Edit: which I consider, at least to date, a bit orthogonal to the Rails ways.

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