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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

#201

Post by andybak »

xamolxix wrote: post #121
andybak wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're a small Django shop and I do weigh up this when deciding if we're the best option for a prospective client. If we build them a site then there is a maintenance cost that is potentially higher than there would be with a PHP site. Of course - the counter-argument is "a good PHP dev is no cheaper and just as hard to find" but for maintenance tasks you might only need an average (or even mediocre) dev - and it's a…

> average (or even mediocre) dev doesn't mediocre mean average?

I think it has probably now developed a more negative connotations by now:

"good sounds about right to me.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#202

Post by bdcravens »

girishso wrote: post #110
bdcravens wrote: post #73

These days, I'm finding a lot of joy in taking parts of a Rails app that feel clunky (meaning they usually aren't Basecamp-like, and I find myself using a lot of magic and config to make it fit a Rails-shaped hole), extracting it out as a stand-alone Sinatra app that uses Sequel instead of ActiveRecord, gemifying it, and then pulling it back into the parent monolith as an engine.

Wow! I didn't know Rails engines can be written in Sinatra/Sequel. Wondering how that works exactly.

Wrap your app in a class (extending Sinatra::Application or Sinatra::Base), require (I gemified it for componentization) then mount in routes:

    mount MySinatraApp => '/some_path'
(you can also mount it as rack app in config.ru, but not sure if you'd get access to things like authenticated session, etc)

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#203

Post by mastazi »

rvense wrote: post #58
mastazi wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Language/framework fads are just that, momentary fads. I believe that, in the long term, things like good architecture, sane dependency management, well-managed life cycle (which includes provisioning and deployment) are far more important than the language/framework you are using. You may not like PHP, for example, but I would still choose to work on a good quality PHP project than a bad one in the latest flashy lan…

I don't know. I just ripped out basically half the rug under my Scala app and put in a new one without the rest even noticing. It's not a very good architecture I don't think, but because of flashy language features like generics that are often dismissed as unimportant or even an impediment "in the real world", I was able to change a core part of the code that basically everything else touches and still be sure that…

I don't want to dismiss the importance of certain language features. I'm just saying that any Turing-complete language with a reasonable ecosystem is good enough in most situations (where good enough != perfect but hey, perfection is the enemy of the good!).

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#204

Post by FooBarWidget »

mmm10 wrote: post #188
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 t…

I cannot agree. I think lots of people (myself included) didn't read the original article and responded purely based on the title. I think that by admitting that he didn't read it and that he corrected that later, he's showing humility (that he too is a fallible human) and that gives his article -more- credibility.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#205

Post by dhagz »

desireco42 wrote: post #191
brightball wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rails is a mature framework now. A lot of people love to hate on mature stuff in programming.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#206

Post by mmm10 »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #204
mmm10 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I cannot agree. I think lots of people (myself included) didn't read the original article and responded purely based on the title. I think that by admitting that he didn't read it and that he corrected that later, he's showing humility (that he too is a fallible human) and that gives his article -more- credibility.

Responding to something without reading it is just stupid. There's no other way to describe such an action.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#207

Post by educar »

Bahamut wrote: post #157
educar wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

@Bahamut, thanks for your perspective! fwiw, we are big angular users as well. I was only questioning it's usage in Google. I think I now know that it's used a lot more than I thought inside google.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#208

Post by Jeff_Dickey »

jeffehobbs wrote: post #96

There’s a lot of personification and anthropomorphism of technology in this piece that distracts. Use the best tool for the job.

Agreed, but I'll just point out that works both ways. Devs "identify" with their default tool of choice, and too many coulda-been-GREAT tools try to be the Swiss Army Nuclear Ginsu Chainsaw of Code rather than the sweet hammer they started out as. Sometimes this happens to dominant tools in a category (such as Rails within Ruby); other times, it's happened to entire languages (PHP, VB, and many others; I once had to maintain a terminal emulator written in COBOL.)

As Larry Wall and countless others have noted, great programmers are creatively lazy. Mediocre-to-average devs are lazy in less creative ways, like sticking to one language/toolchain for years and not diversifying. Anything that lives, including your career, either grows or it dies. Anything that grows within an impenetrable walled garden will eventually crush itself to death within those walls. It's sad when I see people do that to their careers, and over nearly 40 years in this craft, I've had ringside seats to multiple such bouts.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#209

Post by rodolphoarruda »

Dwolb wrote: post #198
rodolphoarruda wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I am not an expert on persuasion techniques, but if you take the same "logical leaps" situation you described in your comment and put it into the context of a business negotiation, chances are the other party may not feel confident enough to do business or simply to agree with you in some conditions because they don't get your line of thought.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#210

Post by girishso »

bdcravens wrote: post #202
girishso wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow! I didn't know Rails engines can be written in Sinatra/Sequel. Wondering how that works exactly.

Wrap your app in a class (extending Sinatra::Application or Sinatra::Base), require (I gemified it for componentization) then mount in routes: mount MySinatraApp => '/some_path' (you can also mount it as rack app in config.ru, but not sure if you'd get access to things like authenticated session, etc)

Cool. A quick search landed me on https://robots.thoughtbot.com/how-to-share-a-session-between... it discusses sharing session using config.ru.

Even after using rails for so many years, learning something new every day!

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