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Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

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Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#201

Post by tekstar »

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…

> Web dev is in a different place now.

Yup, but why? This is still true:

> 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).

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#202

Post by 3pt14159 »

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…

Rails is good for two things: Fast iterating and fast on-boarding new employees.

If you want to start a startup, and you know Rails, use Rails with Postgres.

Do the complicated shit (data science, video uploads, etc) in your other language if you have complicated shit. Use a different subdomain or get nginx to fork the endpoints for the complex shit if it needs to be public.

I've known plenty of people, myself included, that tried something else because of "reasons" but the real reason was I wanted to try some new language or framework but it gets old fast.

> I'm gunna use Riak!

I said. Then I needed to do some random task that would have been trivial in SQL.

> I'm gunna use Go!

I said. Then I spent hours fiddling with types and boiler plate code and catching errors.

These are not solving problems startups have. These technologies solve problems that huge companies have. My only gripe with Rails is that I think it should be JSON-first, not HTML-first, because almost everyone needs an API these days and many people use front end frameworks for HTML, but whatever. It's not that hard to override that stuff.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#203

Post by Jyaif »

bsenftner wrote: post #156
fsloth wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"C++ in 2018? SURE (You masochist)" I know this is tongue in cheek, but if one is doing anything related to real time graphics programming I'm not aware of any good alternatives.

I write integrated servers with the web server, the database server, a video server, and a facial recognition application all bundled together in C++. The application screams: try 1/16th the memory footprint of a traditional multi-server Internet application, it is 4000% faster, and can run on a $100 Intel Compute Stick. Try this in any other language...

I'm doing the same thing, and I've got a couple questions:

How do you handle redundancy, e.g. if your Intel Compute Stick goes offline for any reason? How do you handle crashes of your applications?

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#204

Post by rplnt »

pjmlp wrote: post #63
fsloth wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"C++ in 2018? SURE (You masochist)" I know this is tongue in cheek, but if one is doing anything related to real time graphics programming I'm not aware of any good alternatives.

C# is slowly getting there thanks to Unity efforts with HPC# and Microsoft's improvements on SIMD support, stack allocation and slices. Then on the browser you are stuck with GLSL 3.0 shaders, or any JS library that generates them on the fly. But yeah for the layer that actually talks to the metal, it is still going to be C++ for many years, specially thanks to the ongoing language improvements since C++11 revision.…

Well Unity engine itself is written in C++.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#206

Post by keymone »

pankajdoharey wrote: post #199

Rails is over there is too much traction for Functional Programming these days, and Javascript seems to be the easiest language to explore functional programming and Composability. JS and Nodejs in my opinion are the best and most used langauges in 2018. Also Rails is not beginner friendly, if you are using Rails for a few yrs only then you can understand tons of quirks and pre written code in your controllers. If yo…

> JS and Nodejs in my opinion are the best and most used langauges in 2018

most used? probably. best? not even close. the main reason transpilers from other languages into JS became so popular this last decade is because JS is a horror shit show of a language.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#207

Post by willtim »

beaconstudios wrote: post #130
ryanbrunner wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These days if your chosen language doesn't have things like strong typing, interfaces, good debugging tools, a good compiler, etc, then you should definitely be asking yourself if it's the right tool for the job. All of these things existed long before Ruby on Rails gained in popularity. Unless the popularity of Rails, Python, PHP, and Javascript was all just collective insanity, dynamic languages do offer benefits…

> Unless the popularity of Rails, Python, PHP, and Javascript was all just collective insanity, dynamic languages do offer benefits in some circumstances over languages with stronger type guarantees. with strongly typed languages it's harder to perform exploratory coding. This drives a kind of backpressure on the design stage of development where it becomes more prudent to design your classes and interfaces before yo…

This is not true in general. There is nothing intrinsic to static types that is incompatible with exploratory coding. If you want to turn all your type errors into runtime crashes, then some statically typed languages will even let you do this (e.g. deferred type errors in Haskell).

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#208

Post by moistoreos »

pankajdoharey wrote: post #199

Rails is over there is too much traction for Functional Programming these days, and Javascript seems to be the easiest language to explore functional programming and Composability. JS and Nodejs in my opinion are the best and most used langauges in 2018. Also Rails is not beginner friendly, if you are using Rails for a few yrs only then you can understand tons of quirks and pre written code in your controllers. If yo…

Let's not forget about Elixir. Elixir is what pulled me into functional programming. However, I would argue that you should still use the right tool (programming language and/or frameworks) for the job.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#209

Post by fsloth »

dom96 wrote: post #175
fsloth wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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. T…

Hey! Cool to read you response.

My initial comment may have been a bit uncharitable, and I'm sorry - I chose clear communication instead of overt politeness. I might not resemble the core audience of the language in any way :)

I based my response to the first page mentioning windows install:

https://nim-lang.org/install_windows.html

This is the first page I end up from both https://nim-lang.org and Google.

My instinctive response was based on a pattern matching from trying to run various open source projects on Windows the past 20 years, and how the projects choose to communicate their install narrative. I.e. the "ciphers" I mentioned in my posting above.

Rust needs additional compiler as well, this is how they communicate it: https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/install.html

"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)."

WIX toolset may be an option http://wixtoolset.org. Not having a Windows installer generally appears amateurish nowadays (I know a plain zip is just as good but that's what people do and is generally expected nowadays).

Even Latex which was an incredible mish-mash of various components you needed to... acquire, is now available through just clicking the installer: https://www.latex-tutorial.com/installation/

"...Despite this, you won't find many languages with Windows support that is as good as Nim's."

You could mention msvc in the initial install page since you need it. There was a specific time when projects had good economic and technical reasons not to depend on Visual Studio on windows. Not so much anymore, since it's free for individuals.

Installer landing pages for languages which don't signal my "fragile-not-well-supported" sense:

https://golang.org/dl/

https://www.python.org/downloads/windows/

https://www.erlang.org/downloads

https://www.haskell.org/platform/windows.html

The Ocaml Install page is on the edge, but, that is compensated by a pedigree of being well known and having credible industrial users (i.e. Jane street):

https://ocaml.org/docs/install.html

I know you are a small team and have other priorities than your web page... the installer and mentioning MSVC on the install page would go a long way in increasing the likelihood of at least trying the project for random people running Windows.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#210

Post by regularfry »

zerogvt wrote: post #116

I'm not a web or compiler/interpreter dev so this is probably a noob question but here it goes anyway. If the main complain about ruby is that it is slow then why not trying to make it faster? I don't know how easy or feasible that is but is there an effort towards that?

There is. Ruby's speed is roughly comparable with Python today, and the Ruby 3 push is largely around performance. However, you've got to remember that Rails took off on a generation of Ruby VM architecture much slower than currently available. There's a very large set of problems which Rails works for where the interpreter just isn't the bottleneck.

On the other side of the equation, the reason Ruby has taken such a (comparatively) long time to make fast is that the language does a bunch of stuff that is just really hard to optimise. Not only that, but those facilities (like... defining methods on core classes at arbitrary points of execution, for instance) turn out to have been quite heavily used, so it's not reasonable to remove those facilities in the name of speed.

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