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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

#191

Post by desireco42 »

brightball wrote: post #182
desireco42 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I completely agree, I really enjoy H whatever Lotus.rb is called these days and especially like Trailblazer. So you could say that in general I agree with this sentiment, just, it would never cross my mind to be as hard to Rails as some of commenters are.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#192

Post by desireco42 »

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.

Whoever downvoted me :) just made my score 666 !..! rock on baby!

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#193

Post by sn1de »

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.

Because the Elixir/Phoenix community is largely spawned from the Ruby/Rails community. They are more likely to be continuing to follow what is going on with Rails, even living in both worlds. There are many shared values and experience. That historical affinity is probably why it shows up so much in the same context. The Elixir/Phoenix community is more likely to respect and understand what Rails is and isn't as opposed to the vast majority of pretenders who say they are creating a framework inspired by, or to rival Rails, but really have no clue and proceed to put up something nowhere near the breadth or depth of Rails. Nobody who knows anything is going to come and put up an advocacy post for a PHP framework as an alternative to Rails. They know the Rails community has no interest in going that way. Elixir/Phoenix on the other hand can say with a straight face: we understand Rails and why it is successful and put forward Elixir/Phoenix as a legitimate way forward for those who want to move to a more functional paradigm and the inherent scalability advantages of a Erlang/OTA based foundation.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#194

Post by Retric »

rgbrgb wrote: post #180
Retric wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Systems always get more complex as you add features. At best you can avoid shooting yourself in the foot, but that's ok because none of your competitors can avoid the same issues.

The web's hard problem is dealing with that complexity at a speed and scale that is a few orders of magnitude bigger than any other programming environment I can think of. > At best you can avoid shooting yourself in the foot At best we can keep our systems simple, agile, and cut bad features as quickly as we test new ones (every damn day!).

MMO's are vastly more complex than websites. The issue with websites is they are inherently simple, and adding one dimension of complexity is still easy. But, when people continue to underestimate what adding features actually takes they snowball into unmaintainable crap.

PS: A single 1ghz CPU with a very fast connection could serve the simplest possible webpage to every single person on the planet in less than 1 day. Scaling is only an issue as you add complexity.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#195

Post by jrbapna »

As a rails / startup guy, I can run circles around developers who are using Node/Angular/React/etc. The huge open source community with the infinite number of gems and massive volume of documentation accumulated over years is unparalleled. Sure, Rails may eventually be eclipsed but I see no reason to switch now when my immediate goal is to ship fast with intense speed and fast iteration while focusing on the much more pressing business validation and business objectives of my company. Just my two cents on the topic.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#196

Post by pluma »

saiprashanth93 wrote: post #98
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 develop…

I think "useless" in this case is meant in the sense of "isn't used much". The Ruby community and ecosystem is dominated by Rails to a much greater degree than Python is dominated by Django.

Django is merely one of the more popular solutions to a larger niche of what Python is used for. The closest equivalent to Rails in Python in terms of dominance is probably SciPy and even that comparison is a stretch.

The Python ecosystem is much more diverse than Ruby. Not because Ruby can't be used for anything other than what Rails is used for, but because there are simply more people doing the different things Python can be used for.

And ultimately the practical usefulness of a language depends not just on the suitability of the language itself for the given task but also on the availability of libraries for the common problems you encounter when solving that task. So the usefulness of a language (for a given task) is at least partially defined by how much it is actually used (to solve that task).

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#197

Post by pluma »

nikdaheratik wrote: post #50
Bahamut wrote: post #22

"But I would never, ever, begin a new business that depends solely on Angular to survive. Why? Because Google doesn't need it. It didn't blink to give up GWT, it didn't have to think twice to decide to rewrite Angular 2 in an incompatible way to Angular 1, and so on." This is just wrong - almost 3/4 of Google's web apps depend on Angular from what I have heard from multiple Googlers. If a rare instance where an Angul…

I think you're probably right, but at the same time, Google does have a history of killing off projects for reasons that make sense to them but seem kind of arbitrary. Of course, Angular is OSS and is likely to live on into obsolescence no matter what Google ends up doing with it.

Who do you think will take over Angular when Google kills it off?

Is there any large company or, heck, any somewhat organized group of people outside of Google supporting Angular or using Angular at a scale that warrants the investment of maintaining the project rather than migrating to a different technology?

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#198

Post by Dwolb »

rodolphoarruda wrote: post #187
Dwolb wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That's really interesting - I hadn't heard of this difference between languages. Thanks for sharing.

Do you feel differences in context-type of a language means persuasion techniques differ as well?

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#199

Post by eropple »

aantix wrote: post #186
eropple wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Plenty I'd like to, but I don't see any for which I have clear copyrights to share.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#200

Post by aswanson »

brightball wrote: post #183
aswanson wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, asking which has less external dependencies to get up and going fast.
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