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Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

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Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#161

Post by wgerard »

sureaboutthis wrote: post #150
fergie wrote: post #131

Rails really nailed the problems of web development as it was 10 years ago by (rightly) pointing out that 97.2% of web projects were all about making an application server talk nicely to a relational database and then generating a front end that reflected the data model and that had javascript that Just Worked (everywhere). Web dev is in a different place now. Developers don't generally install and maintain applicati…

> ...jQuery, which in turn was supplanted by vanilla js actually becoming useful. jQuery is written in vanilla js so vanilla js can do anything jQuery can. I'm always irritated when people claim that vanilla js can't do something X can do.

It's hyperbole, but the point is that vanilla JS couldn't accomplish it easily without a lot of headache.

Handling browser compatibility alone made jQuery extremely useful back when it first emerged.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#162

Post by aantix »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #134
thinkingkong wrote: post #16

I mean... Let's pause for a minute and remove the year, and remove the language / framework. What are we trying to accomplish? If we know something really well and there are enough developers to support an ecosystem and the talent pool in your is big enough just use whatever you want. PHP in 2018? SURE. C++ in 2018? SURE (You masochist) Rails in 2018? Youre damn right I would. GO in 2018? OK. Fine. Whatever. This is…

This is pretty much my thought. I lead a jumpstarted development effort for a startup last year (we used an agency to get through the initial build). We looked into several options, but ultimately decided to use Rails. Why? We all knew exactly what we could expect from Rails and we knew we could get it to work in the way we wanted without too much hassle. Sure, we might hit growth problems in years but we can cross t…

I consulted on a site that could get 50 million unique users in any given month, sometimes with large bursts of traffic.

A heavy read site is trivial to scale these days. Serve static assets from CDNs, fragment cache the views, horizontally scale when needed. Rinse, repeat.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#163

Post by bsenftner »

TimMurnaghan wrote: post #78
eahman16 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with C++ if you use a small subset of it, like for example Carmack did in Doom 3. The only problem that arises with C++ is when people want to use EVERYTHING in the language, because if it exists, it has to be in my project, right?

If you're using a small subset why on earth is it the right language? I had the misfortune to try to mentor a new quant who felt they had to write C++ "for speed" . But refused to use the STL as they were going to use a subset. So they wrote Fortran-like C++, array as the only data structure, bad lookup algorithms and leaked like a sieve. Things are in the language for a reason - if you've got the issue then you use…

Let's just be honest: today's dev's can't write in C/C++ because they don't have the formal training. They are primarily script language devs who can't work at the low level required by C/C++. The formally educated programmers who were taught low level large-scale systems programming are too few to create the programmer farms you all work it (which I left for scientific software development, where the devs are older and we all work in C/C++ or assembly.)

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#164

Post by irq11 »

collyw wrote: post #89

Its kind of ridiculous that in this industry we are expected to jump on new trends every couple of years to stay current, rather than learn how to use the tools that we do have well. Sure we get some benefits, but 90 % of the time it seems we are just chasing fads. (Yes is my answer to the question).

This is the only correct response.

I’ve been doing this a long time, and it’s demotivating to see every new generation of noob developer turn their nose up at the work of the generations before.

It’s not as if Rails has stagnated - it keeps getting better with every release. You could be excused for wanting to switch from Java servlets and PHP apps back in the day, because the Rails dev experience was that much better. But all of this Javascript crap is just re-writing for the sake of re-writing. And it happened so quickly - not even six years ago, Rails was the obvious choice for a new web app. Technologically, what has changed since then? Very little.

People unironically ask if Rails is “still relevant”, and then switch back to their (hideously slow, JS-based) editor to grind out spaghetti code in node, not even stopping to wonder why their NPM dependency tree has sixteen different versions of the same json module.

Such a waste.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#165

Post by paulie_a »

whalesalad wrote: post #21
paulie_a wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair the technology stack is almost irrelevant when you are starting a company. write it in perl, python, rails, hell write it in old school cgi and use c++. It all comes down to how many sales did you make today. The clients will rarely care what language was used behind the scenes.

That’s a pretty myopic way to look at it. Sure, use what you know and forget the branding of your technology, I agree. But you need to be cognizant of short term vs long term gains, gasoline you can pour on the fire (libraries and integrations), the team you are going to build, the deployment story, the ops story, etc... I’ve seen companies that made poor technical decisions up front spend years paying for those mist…

My point was that the technology in a startup is nearly irrelevant if you don't have sales.

Step 1-1000 of building a startup is selling.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#166

Post by pythonaut_16 »

0xADEADBEE wrote: post #81
erokar wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Django comes close to Rails with regards to productivity. Granted, Django has slightly more overhead to get started, but Django also includes an admin interface and a built-in auth system, which Rails does not.

I work in a lot of Django shops and my Ruby is nowhere near as good as my Python but I'll pick Rails every time if I'm working on a side project. Why? Because the development velocity when using it is unparalleled. I can have an MVP up orders of magnitude quicker than I can with Django/Flask/Twisted. You're absolutely right on the Admin interface and auth, but auth is a gem install away [1] and Django's admin won't f…

You might know Python but it sounds like you don't know Django very well.

Django does have built in JSON support[1]. There's also Django Rest Framework[2], which while not built into the core, is well supported and hardly a burden to add.

And finally, Django's "scaffolding" functionality is built around its models. You define your model as a plain Python class inheriting from Django's model class, and then the various generic[3]/"scaffolding" views work by being told what model they're for, with the ability to override and extend whatever you want to.

[1]-https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.1/ref/request-response/#...

[2]-http://www.django-rest-framework.org/

[3]-https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.1/topics/class-based-vie...

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#167

Post by bsenftner »

fsloth wrote: post #66
lloeki wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not aware of any good alternatives. Vulkan/C? Metal/ObjC†/C? From C libs you can probably get to bindings to other languages like D, Haskell, Rust, Go†. † depending on your definition of "real time" (soft vs hard), both kernel-wise and GC-wise.

"Vulkan/C? Metal/ObjC†/C? " Vulkan and C are a sane option. Although, with C and linear algebra one starts to miss C++ operator overloading and existing libraries like eigen [0] or glm[1] with their graphics and computational geometry targeting API:s really soon. If one deploys only to OS X/IOS, Metal and ObjC, sure. "From C libs you can probably get to bindings to other languages like D, Haskell, Rust, Go†." With th…

For the several dozen EA games I worked on, in C++, all operator overloading was banned. Too many fools play dumb tricks with operator overloading, so it was declared illegal. I don't miss it, as it is a fool's tool.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#168

Post by maximp »

batiste wrote: post #106
hspak wrote: post #14

Rails is still probably the most productive* web framework out there. It's got a mature ecosystem that covers it's weaknesses. * productive as in easy to get started, easy to iterate, easy to get things done.

Granted you know Ruby well and like coding in it. The amount you need to learn if you don't know RoR or Ruby is huge... You might get some stuff running fast copy pasting some example but claiming that it is all super easy to do anything meaningful is misleading.

This was exactly my experience. I struggled building with Rails, and every day was an uphill battle trying to learn the machinery. I switched to Node, and feel my better. My structure isn't nearly as pretty, optimal, or efficient now, but I'm actually learning the base concepts and understanding what I'm doing.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#169

Post by joelbluminator »

collyw wrote: post #89

Its kind of ridiculous that in this industry we are expected to jump on new trends every couple of years to stay current, rather than learn how to use the tools that we do have well. Sure we get some benefits, but 90 % of the time it seems we are just chasing fads. (Yes is my answer to the question).

That happens mostly in front end, backend world moves slower. It's why I just don't like front end coding anymore, I feel like I have better use of my time than learning a new framework every 3 years.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#170

Post by sydd »

sho wrote: post #9

Of course it is. The question is kind of silly. For basically any startup, my advice would be: unless and until you can credibly explain a genuine reason why you can't use Rails - use Rails. I'm not some crazy fanboy but until someone can actually name a seriously competitive, batteries-included, all-in-one framework* which delivers everything, or even most of, what Rails does - it is very relevant and you ignore it…

Except for 2 things: Finding developers. while it's possible it's much harder that say Java. You'll be in trouble if you are not in a metropolis and need 5+ rails developers. Long term sustainability. While it will work for your MVP, at some point you will need to rewrite it in a language that sclaes to 10.000s of lines of code and that will be painful.
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