Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

akitaonrails.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 213 posts

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#141

Post by tboyd47 »

putzdown wrote: post #133

This article is a superb example of bad writing, of bad thinking. I have no skin in the Ruby/Rails game. I'm not a web developer. But I'm interested in the fates of languages and the merits of major approaches that define many jobs and decide the employability of millions, so I read it. The problem is: what in the world is he saying? What is his thesis, and what reason does he give us for believing his thesis? His op…

I found it pretty coherent, actually. The author is trying to reset our focus from the technical details of how Rails works to the bigger picture of how the market for web technology has evolved over time. All the more important for those of us with "skin in the game," which I'm guessing means coders, because we tend to be myopic about our little world of symbols and tools, and often get caught clueless when the rug gets pulled out from under us by market forces that are indifferent to which design patterns are objectively better than others.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#142

Post by pjc50 »

braythwayt wrote: post #139

I recall a lot of articles like this about J2EE. And then a lot like this about MSFT technologies. There was an essay pg wrote where he said that Microsoft was Dead ( http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html ). He didn’t mean dead as in “Dead," he meant dead as in “Nobody is afraid of them any more,” and the generalization of that is that it was no longer relevant. I think Rails is there. I think Rails is dead. Obvio…

“A new perspective is worth 80 points of IQ.”

That's not how IQ works. It's not additive.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#143

Post by braythwayt »

pjc50 wrote: post #142
braythwayt wrote: post #139

I recall a lot of articles like this about J2EE. And then a lot like this about MSFT technologies. There was an essay pg wrote where he said that Microsoft was Dead ( http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html ). He didn’t mean dead as in “Dead," he meant dead as in “Nobody is afraid of them any more,” and the generalization of that is that it was no longer relevant. I think Rails is there. I think Rails is dead. Obvio…

“A new perspective is worth 80 points of IQ.” That's not how IQ works. It's not additive.

The quote is from Dr. Alan Kay. I think he knew that when he said, it, and personally I think IQ is a racist, bullshit metric. But the general idea of the quote is still meaningful, and the thing I am saying when quoting it is that having gone mainstream, adopting Rails is no longer about adopting a new perspective.

It’s tautological: You don’t get a new perspective, or an advantage, by adopting the mainstream thing and using it the mainstream way with the mainstream best practices, carefully writing your code to be familiar to the mainstream programmers.

That’s not a bad thing, but it is a different thing from when Rails was first popping up in Reddit’s old days and HN’s early days.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#144

Post by edbloom »

putzdown wrote: post #133

This article is a superb example of bad writing, of bad thinking. I have no skin in the Ruby/Rails game. I'm not a web developer. But I'm interested in the fates of languages and the merits of major approaches that define many jobs and decide the employability of millions, so I read it. The problem is: what in the world is he saying? What is his thesis, and what reason does he give us for believing his thesis? His op…

Ah now that's a bit harsh. I thought it was pretty clear. Perhaps not getting to the point as quick as possible - but clear nevertheless.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#145

Post by neon_electro »

eropple wrote: post #120
bascule wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know what you mean by "service objects", but my point is that ActiveRecord requires you to have a line to the database in order to actually populate a database. This is really shit for a SOA; you should not require a connection to the user database to be able to make heads or tails of an object from your authn/authz service. It is so completely unacceptable that I consider it completely disqualifying (to say…

Could you point to any resources for someone who has been learning stock Rails/ActiveRecord to learn more about the approach you prefer?

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#146

Post by scient »

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…

So when you tell people that 3 years down the road the package ecosystem mess is going to be so bad that a package containing a one-line function broke half of the internet, they would go ahead and pick that technology to learn? Oh buddy.... say it aint so.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#147

Post by bascule »

eropple wrote: post #120
bascule wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know what you mean by "service objects", but my point is that ActiveRecord requires you to have a line to the database in order to actually populate a database. This is really shit for a SOA; you should not require a connection to the user database to be able to make heads or tails of an object from your authn/authz service. It is so completely unacceptable that I consider it completely disqualifying (to say…

Oh, so you're talking about SOA / "microservices" and Claims-Based Identity (or rather, Claims-Based Identity is what you should be using). Well, an ORM is totally the wrong way to go about expressing user identities in a distributed system.

As it were I wrote the AuthN/AuthZ library Square uses to solve this problem:

https://github.com/square/rails-auth

The objects we build for representing user identities are POROs. No need for every app to have a database connection to a shared user service, or to go through an ORM.

I'm somewhat confused what alternative you're even proposing here: are you doing something weird like Marshalling ORM objects between services?

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#148

Post by angelbob »

braythwayt wrote: post #139

I recall a lot of articles like this about J2EE. And then a lot like this about MSFT technologies. There was an essay pg wrote where he said that Microsoft was Dead ( http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html ). He didn’t mean dead as in “Dead," he meant dead as in “Nobody is afraid of them any more,” and the generalization of that is that it was no longer relevant. I think Rails is there. I think Rails is dead. Obvio…

I think Ruby may still have a few under-recognized advantages for small teams :-)

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#149

Post by jonstokes »

brightball wrote: post #128
rosalinekarr wrote: post #125

Rails isn't the fastest or the smartest framework. It has weird choices, confusing aspects and some downright terrible defaults, but for me at least, it is the best framework and it has been for years for one simple reason: DOCUMENTATION! Every few years or so, a bunch of these articles come out shouting from the roof tops, "Rails is dead!" and "Long live Rails!" They often like to praise some new framework, like Han…

Elixir and Phoenix is what you're looking for. Most of the goodness of Rails for productivity, without the long term bad decisions that come with it to force eventual rewrites when the funding comes. There's a reason Rails core guys have put so much time into it. It gets every...single...dang...decision...right. I may never use another language unless forced because it's what I've spent years trying to find.

If you discover a hot new language/framework that solves all of your problems, then here is what you've actually learned: you didn't have any hard problems.

No tool is perfect for every situation, and if you find one that is perfect for every situation that you encounter, then that says a lot more about you than about the tool.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#150

Post by smt88 »

soft_dev_person wrote: post #67
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.…

I don't disagree, but your last point is rather misleading as Java on Github also includes pretty much all Android projects.

All of the different data points are imperfect measurements, which is why I attempted to include many angles.
Post reply on HN