I'd agree that the initial approach of Rails is becoming dated but Rails is quickly moving away from this. Consider Rails 5. Native web sockets and an API mode make Rails an excellent backend for JS apps. You fail to recognize the evolution of the framework and where it continues to fit in today. If you're done with Rails it's probably because you failed to evolve with the framework.
Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room
151–160 of 213 posts
Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room
#152Rails 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.
Why does someone come to promote Elixir and Phoenix in every Ruby/Rails article? The first times was nice to see someone showing an alternative, now is almost like SPAM.
Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room
#153Earlier 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 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".
I completely agree that Rails (and Rails-inspired frameworks, like Laravel and Sails) has won. I was disagreeing specifically with the assertion that Ruby has beaten PHP or Java.
Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room
#154This 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 read the article first to give it a chance and I have to say you're correct in your diagnosis.
The author's main issue with his writing style is he makes logical leaps without bringing the user along. He jumps from topic to topic without letting the user know why he's doing so.
I think the piece can be improved with some structural changes. So I would recommend the author or other readers consider this style for structurally formulating arguments for essays or presentations [1] often used at McKinsey.
(Note: I know McKinsey gets a lot of hate around here sometimes, but given their ability to consult with C-suite leadership, they're probably pretty good at formulating arguments/persuasion)
[1] https://medium.com/lessons-from-mckinsey/the-pyramid-princip...
Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room
#155Earlier 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…
For the vast majority of apps, SOA is detrimental to productivity and maintainability. For some cases it is the right choice but I don't think anyone is arguing that these are the cases for which AR was designed.
Can't you recognize the usefulness of a hammer even if you need a screwdriver for your task?
Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room
#156Earlier 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…
I didn't mean to suggest people shouldn't write Ruby or that one language is better than the others. I was just stating (and backing up) a fact about web programming. Whether you think it's unfortunate, fortunate, or neutral is up to you.
Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I also found https://www.madewithangular.com/#/categories/google . It's a far far far cry from OPs original assertion that 3/4 apps in Google are made of angular.
The Angular team has said over 70% of web apps at Google use Angular, but I can't recall what talks they have said that at off the top of my head. Various members of the Angular team have told me this directy as well, and are pretty open about that fact in general.
One told me about the broken release at one point last year bringing Google to a halt until that got fixed, since Google runs off of the master branch of Angular. Google has a lot of apps, most of them internal (I have seen some external ones too, such as a Nexus site in the past, and Google Domains. Google App Engine and Adwords also use it, as given in talks in the past - the Angular team is grouped under the Ads group within Google). Your original question for proof was completely misguided when accounting for that - examples of external facing apps does not confirm or deny percentage, it was a poorly conceived attack.
Certain apps like Gmail/Inbox go through very long development cycles and have specialized requirements. An Angular team member has explained to me that sometimes some teams think they can do better with vanilla JS - none of the popular web frameworks really met Google's perf/business requirements for those behemoth apps, although with the way Angular 2 is shaping, it likely will hit the bar (the Angular team has managed to get a hello world app smaller than a react-based one, and this is before they extract out the template compiler to allow tree shaking of that for builds - very impressive perf numbers were also thrown at Google I/O last week). Google has a lot of resources they can throw at big consumer facing apps, so they can build homespun frameworks if they need to (for big sites like YouTube, Inbox, Calendar, etc.).
I should also detail that I'm not someone unknowledgable about Angular and how it is used - I am one of the biggest Angular experts outside of Google, a core maintainer of one of the three most largest third party Angular libraries & involved in another top three most used third party library (UI Bootstrap and UI Router, respectively) and a contributor to many projects across the ecosystem. I am very aware of all of the things that are Angular's strengths, and its shortcomings (especially 1, and 2 to a lesser degree...but nobody is really an expert at 2 yet, excepting maybe Tobias Bosch on the Angular 2 team with his crazy work on it).
Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room
#158This 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…
He's writing in his second (third?) language. How's your second language?
Akita is a pretty smart dude. He makes a number of good points, and maybe doesn't tie them perfectly together, but it's a blog post he wrote in a day, not for Harpers.
A few points from his rant:
1. If you don't drink the kool aid, you'll be frustrated if you want something else 2. market forces: you have to follow rails, but if rails changes or goes away, you're stuck (-ish, it's OSS) 3. rails is good at what it does, and provides many with a useful framework, even if, in retrospect, it isn't well architected
Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room
#159I 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.
I think you might be getting downvoted for stating it so baldly.
IQ scores reflect the place of a particular person relative to the population rather than a simple score derived from performance. You may mean that IQ doesn't work like decibels, which are intended for the invariant expression of relative loudness. It's a complicated area and I don't think "additive" quite captures the property that you are saying IQ doesn't have...
Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room
#160I'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…
> At points I've tried to keep three ORMs/DB libraries in my head at a time: AR, DataMapper, and Sequel ... At least AR has any story around things like optimistic and pessimistic locking
That's rather dating your "at points". DataMapper hasn't seen an update since 2011, and Sequel's shipped with optimistic and pessimistic locking since early 2010.