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Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

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Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#171

Post by pythonaut_16 »

ankurdhama wrote: post #39

The article mentions: Root of all evil is state. No its not, but again we love to make generalised sweeping statements (i.e small statement that can be quoted and people think of them some kind of wisdom) The problem is that "mutable shared state" is hard to manage and can lead to various kinds of problems. There are many tested patterns/libraries around that you can use to manage it rather than trying to implement y…

> Root of all evil is state.

That's such a funny thing to say. You'd be hard pressed to have a program without state. Every program is made up of a combination of 3? components: logic, data(state), and time.

The thing that differentiates different programming languages and tools is what abstractions they build around those three things and how they are exposed to the programmer.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#172

Post by wolco »

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…

Curious why someone would pick rails over php in 2018. Existing pool of developers perhaps.. Any other reason?

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#173

Post by PunchTornado »

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…

laravel can do all that

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#174

Post by joelbluminator »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #157
sheeshkebab wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a recent developer - no, it’s impossible. For anyone who wrote code for 10+ years, picking up a new language and framework is typically piece of cake (I’d say 80 hours is more than enough). Complexity comes from learning a new domain - a web developer can’t learn mobile, game engine, or HFT development in two weeks, but that doesn’t have to to do with languages or frameworks.

I'm 49 years old, and I've been programming since I was 10, on a Vic 20. I've been doing web development for 20 years, from Frontpage to PHP to Rails to .NET to Java. Picking up .NET wasn't terrible, but I've been at the Java/Grails/Spring/Angular stuff for MONTHS, and I'm just barely getting off the ground. I guess I'm just old and/or stupid.

I get you can't escape Angular (and friends) if you are doing front end, but why not just stick to 2 things on the backend? php and java, ruby and .net or whatever. I just don't see the point in doing Grails, Rails, Spring, Laravel, Node etc etc instead of mastering 1-3 technologies really well.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#175

Post by dom96 »

fsloth wrote: post #151
jdc wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on what libraries you need, Nim and D seem like decent alternatives.

"Nim ... seem like decent alternatives." Note that I specified real time graphics development as the focus area here for C++. While I don't want to get into platform wars, on that front Windows is a really strong contender, for various ecological reasons. Nim does not seem to be well supported on windows [0]. The typical cyphers for poor windows support in open source projects, that seem to hold true for Nim, are tha…

Wow. We really need to fix our install page if people are reaching this conclusion.

Hey, Nim dev here. I can assure you that Windows is incredibly well supported by Nim.

> a) No mention of MSVC support as a compiler option

https://nim-lang.org/faq.html#how-do-i-use-a-different-c-com...

> b) Installer does not install the complete required language runtime, and the end user must hunt the missing DLL:s by themselves.

The DLLs are all included in the .zip file. Even if they weren't, you do not need to "hunt" them, there is a link for them at the bottom of the download page.

> Need to manually configure various paths

You don't. It's easy to think that when you only read the headings though :(

Here is an excerpt from under the heading:

> The zip file includes a simple application called finish.exe that can attempt to add the first directory into your PATH. This tool also checks for the presence of a C compiler and can install MingW, the GNU C compiler collection for Windows.

The installation isn't perfect, we did have an installer in the past but it proved more trouble than it was worth (NSIS is very archaic and INNO is a PITA). Despite this, you won't find many languages with Windows support that is as good as Nim's.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#176

Post by ahartmetz »

bsenftner wrote: post #163
TimMurnaghan wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You don't need formal education to understand why some things are the way they are in C++, you need to understand how a CPU works. A small amount of assembly programming is sufficient for that - it is actually very simple to understand, just hard to write nontrivial programs...

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#177

Post by wolco »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #30
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.

I refuse to write Perl. If enough people feel the same way, Perl is not a good choice.

Long term perhaps but short term it means increased salaries.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#178

Post by conradfr »

joelbluminator wrote: post #87
Jedi72 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elixir/Phoenix is the spiritual successor to Rails. Same philosophy of batteries included, developer productivity focussed etc. But with lots of great new shiny things, for example websockets is built directly into the framework, its not an add-on. Its not a direct upgrade, but if you value Rails definitely check it out

The Elixir community would LIKE it to be a spiritual successor for Rails, but it really isn't. If only because of the learning curve of understanding Elixir. Sorry to disappoint anyone but Phenoix is not going to be the new Rails/Django.

I like Elixir and Phoenix but I agree with you.

First I think a very large number of developers don't care for functional programming.

Then Phoenix is mainly run by only two persons, Chris McCord and José Valim (who also manages Elixir and Ecto). If I compare the pace of development and what you get out of the box with PHP/Symfony (I don't know RoR) it's quite clear that Phoenix is not there yet (without even speaking of the difference in ecosystem size).

Having said that I'm excited for Phoenix 1.4 https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/milestone/17

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#179

Post by psychometry »

wolco wrote: post #172
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…

Curious why someone would pick rails over php in 2018. Existing pool of developers perhaps.. Any other reason?

Because even in 2018 PHP is still PHP?

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#180

Post by bdcravens »

iamleppert wrote: post #110

One thing you'll run into with rails in 2018 for web development is it's going to be hard to find developers and only getting harder by the day. Rails developers are aging. They are no longer your 20 year old hipsters, that stereotype has long since gone, they have families now and boy are they EXPENSIVE. React is what people new to web development are LEARNING and that's all you need to care about. You can get react…

Why would you compare a backend with a frontend framework? Are you implying Node on the backend? React developers are dependent on a backend, be it Node, a managed solution like Firebase, or Rails.

I don't think it's a matter of React instead of Rails, but rather, Rails developers are learning they must add frontend skills, and React seems the safe bet. Many are probably shifting to Node, given the idea (true or not) that Javascript in the entire stack makes the most sense.

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