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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

#181

Post by brightball »

bphogan wrote: post #178
brightball wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nope. It doesn't. I've spent two years working with it. And "gets every single dang decision right" is a matter of opinion. Chris and José are incredibly wonderful people, but they are just as opinionated as the people behind Rails. So "gets decisions right" sounds good as long as you agree with those decisions. I happen to love working with Elixir and Phoenix. I find working with Ecto frustrating not because of the…

Depends on the decisions, but in my experience the way they've setup to do things encourages the proper balance of productivity, separation of concerns, maintainability and data integrity.

The balance on the database side of things has been most impressive because I didn't expect it at all coming from several years of Rails. In my experience to this point, the idea of letting your database enforce the integrity of your data was generally viewed as heresy. You could do it and the Rails team itself provided all of the tools to do it properly, but it seemed as if the community in general was totally opposed to it. The community shift towards embracing PostgreSQL so heavily has seemed to slowly be steering that trend away but there's still a lot of opposition. I've seen some tragic consequences because of those decisions in the last few years.

The balance encouraged in Programming Phoenix sets an excellent standard for a growing community.

The view + template layer has been a breath of fresh air.

Of course, to each his own.

Phoenix has me more excited about work than I've been in years though and I'm that guy that doesn't shut up about things that he loves. :-)

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#182

Post by brightball »

desireco42 wrote: post #162
brightball wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I really love Elixir and Phoenix and see myself using them heavily in the future, I just think you are completely not fair to Rails.

I've taught a course on Rails and I still use it everyday for work. It just has some long term weaknesses that are hard to swallow after a while.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#183

Post by brightball »

aswanson wrote: post #174
brightball wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that it basically locks you out of the ecosystem of Linux/Unix and that is significantly larger and more important than the ecosystem of Rails.

Ok. Imagine me a developer just trying to put up an MVP to see if the idea gets traction. Pitch me on why I should rely on a toolchain that has multiple versions, bundles, and a plethora of (possibly) compatible packages vs one ide with autocompletion and a built in package manager that automatically picks the jquery, json, whateverelse-supporting-javascript library I need etc with a single install?

Are you asking me to get you to pick against .NET in favor of Rails/Django/Phoenix/Play/Grails/Laravel/etc?

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#184

Post by brightball »

base wrote: post #152
brightball wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Honestly, I'm just excited.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#185

Post by iqisracist »

braythwayt wrote: post #143
pjc50 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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…

Oh boy Numbers are racist now

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#186

Post by aantix »

eropple wrote: post #166
xtian wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

When that hammer inevitably is used on screw-related tasks, I get a bit touchy. ActiveRecord in particular is one of the bigger offenders (well, Rails full-stop is one), being applied in all sorts of ways that somebody (hi) ends up having to fix, which is why I mention it. I don't agree with regards to SOAs and either productivity or maintainability, but I also tend to work on systems that have concrete needs for sca…

Any specific code examples you'd like to share where you thought ActiveRecord was inferior to the alternative you provided?

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#187

Post by rodolphoarruda »

Dwolb wrote: post #154
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 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 st…

This also has to do with the differences between a high-context language (Portuguese) and a low-context language (English). Portuguese is my first language, and I can remember that I needed a lot feedback from native English speakers in order to fine tune my speech -- let alone writing -- so they could actually get it.

RE: http://www.thunderbird.edu/article/understanding-high-and-lo...

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#188

Post by mmm10 »

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…

You know the post is bad when the second paragraph is:

    First of all, it's inevitable but I still hate dramatic headlines, even though I
    write like this myself sometimes. "My time with Rails is up" like it's saying
    "And you should leave Rails now too if you're smart". I dismissed the article
    entirely because of that. I was about to post a counter-rant to that without
    reading it properly, but now that I have, I wrote this new article from scratch.
How can someone admit that he started writing a counter-rant without reading the original post? I know he said he changed and started from scratch but if someone admits something like this you can't expect something good afterwards. This might explain why the rest of the post is just he spiting random stuff to pretend anything there makes sense.

If you go over other posts in that blog you will notice the same pattern: spit random (and most of the time wrong) stuff in an attempt that something will make sense (which never does).

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#189

Post by braythwayt »

iqisracist wrote: post #185
braythwayt wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh boy Numbers are racist now

I really think you can do better to make constructive contributions to discourse on Hacker News. In that spirit, what I'll say is that no, numbers in and of themselves aren't racist, or biased, and neither are words, sentences, facts and so forth.

But the way someone uses them can be racist, or biased, whether deliberately or systemically (which is where a system creates racist or biased outcomes, even though no one person is attempting to create a racist or biased outcome).

http://braythwayt.com/2016/03/30/racism-is-injustice.html

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#190

Post by brhays »

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…

Thanks for this Reg, I have spent the last year of my life trying to vacuum the drama out of this discussion. The "working retirement" of mature technology is so normal and pretty wonderful in the scheme of things. Even the "prominent defector" bit is easily predictable. Once you know this, you can pick technology for the stability & productivity or the +80 IQ, depending on your situation.

https://speakerdeck.com/tehviking/surviving-the-framework-hy...

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