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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

#91

Post by bhaak »

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.…

I think you are interpreting it the wrong way (and I don't even mean that you wrongly equate Ruby with Rails).

If you look at the existing web frameworks, how many of those are RoR clones? That's what I see when somebody says "Rails won".

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#92

Post by dagw »

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 someone who spends most of his time on "Hard Problems" but has done a fair share of web apps/CRUD apps I have to admit that web apps are deceptively hard. While going from zero to working prototype web app is trivial in any language, going from working prototype to fully secured, fast, scalable site that is easy to maintain, extend and deploy and easy to use across all devices and browsers is a massive pain in the ass and the difference between the right tool and the wrong tool can easily be an order of magnitude or more in time. Combine this with the fact that the time budget in most web projects is tiny, and the difference in tool choice can really make or break a project.

Basically stuff like Image Processing is trivial from an software design/architecture point of view since it's 90+% math and computer science so the the software 'architecture' tools don't matter. Non-trivial web apps on the other hand are 90+% an architecture problem so there those tools matter a great deal.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#93

Post by reitanqild »

vonklaus wrote: post #78
reitanqild wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Java has had huge amounts of open source code for years. (Case in point: course provider sales representative telling my colleague somewhat annoyed that Java people are the worst because "they are used to get everything for free.) 2. Im going to read that as "... 1 month after finishing studies". I will recommend starting somewhere where you get good colleagues. When I finished school I was sure I could never work…

I mean, could I teach myself Java and build something interesting in a month. Sounds like a no?

Depends on you as well as your definition of interesting.

I'd say you should start in a good team anyway because real life experience IMO is crucial and getting on a good team is a way of getting it fast and as painless as possible (I.E. without breaking your bank.)

If you just want to make "something" go with whatever is less friction for you (for me it was php), just be prepared that there will be friction in any language as soon as you step outside of the tutorials.

Also keep in mind that if you get a good job you can do quite a lot on your spare time. I used to code a utility program in php while commuting. It never became a commercial success but a rewritten version became a major hit with the church I belong to, was maintained and in use for years and gave me both experience in sw architecture as well as bragging rights in job interviews for several years. (Oh and it totally helped in getting my head ready for my paid work in the morning as well as unwinding after work.)

But I also think Java has come a far way towards beginner-friendly. If you do just accept that in Java land IDEs are a must. Getting used to IDEs was were Java "clicked" for me. Use either Netbeans (all features free, my preferred choice), IntelliJ (lots of features free) or Eclipse (all features you'll ever want is free but takes some getting used to, I would never picked it as my first IDE if it wasn't the preferred choice on my first team and they where happy to help me up to speed.) And dismiss everyone who tells you that one of them is crap or way better: it is just a matter of preference in most cases. (Notable exception: android development where IntelliJ is the officially supported alternative.)

Also learn to use Maven or gradle.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#94

Post by mcbits »

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.…

I wouldn't put much weight on GitHub language stats because there's a lot of duplication, and people check in libraries and tooling (usually JS, it seems) that overwhelm whatever language they're actually using.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#95

Post by gamesbrainiac »

holografix wrote: post #80

Ruby was the number 1 reason why about 6 years ago, fresh out of uni with a Java/C background, I chose to learn Python and Django. Ruby seemed rather useless outside of Rails and I really, really liked what I saw in the Zen of Python. Ie. less magic, explicit > implicit. Etc.

I have to agree here. Its a good thing that Django doesn't have the kind of overwhelming power that Rails has in the community, which is pretty awesome! There's a lot of diversity, like flask, pyramid and others; although Django does have a large part of the pie.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#98

Post by saiprashanth93 »

holografix wrote: post #80

Ruby was the number 1 reason why about 6 years ago, fresh out of uni with a Java/C background, I chose to learn Python and Django. Ruby seemed rather useless outside of Rails and I really, really liked what I saw in the Zen of Python. Ie. less magic, explicit > implicit. Etc.

It's great that you learned Python and Django instead of Rails, but it seems pretty uncalled for to call Ruby useless outside of Rails.

Programming languages take off because they show off their power by implementing a great library or by doing a better way of doing things which is what Ruby did using Rails.

The impact of Rails on frameworks/libraries in other languages is also significant since a lot of Ruby developers moved to JS/Elixir/Go and started contributing and implementing the best patterns found in Rails/Sinatra etc.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#99

Post by izietto »

Periodically raise up such articles à la "Rails is dead, long live the Rails". Rails has won in the past because it was so more pragmatic than its alternatives, and in the end better designed, and still wins now because it is more mature than its recent better designed competitors (Phoenix, Hanami, ..), and its community is so a big speed up now.

> People think that because something is "technically superior" everybody else should blindly adopt. But this is not how the market works.

This is really the citation describing the web development of the last 10-15 years. No surprise it comes from DHH.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#100

Post by mtbcoder »

busterarm wrote: post #72
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…

WordPress is a valid question/option for them if they have a large amount of content they have to add using their marketing staff instead of more expensive developer consultants. It also is if they don't have a years-long working relationship with you, because who is going to maintain all of this when you're gone? At least if they have to dump your work and build a new theme, they don't have to worry about figuring o…

> WP isn't bad per-se

From a data standpoint, yes, WP is bad. Really bad. The poor quality code base of WP is only one half of the equation. The other half is the downright awful, novice database schema that ships with it. I've never seen a database schema that is so tightly coupled with the parent application that it essentially hijacks your data into always needing itself simply to extract and render data. WP takes the "relational" out of relational database and flushes it down the toilet. To add to the mess, instead of fixing the rot of its database schema and data handling functionality, WP developers, in their infinite wisdom, merge a woefully incomplete, faux-API system into WP's core, thereby further sealing the door of ever having a clean, thoughtfully designed database that one can access outside of WP and PHP.

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