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Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

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Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#231
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...

What C++ web server library/framework do you use? Or did you roll your own? For the database, are you using SQLite or something else?

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#233

Apologies for the length here, but it seems like programming language and stack philosophy discussions simply require obscene amounts of length to produce fully-rational arguments. Trying to cut back invariably forces you to end the journey to philosophical truth with subjectively-felt emotion. Would appreciate feedback on what could be removed without compromising legibility. Programmers generally overvalue the util…

I find sequelize really cumbersome and syntactically ugly. I would recommend typeorm or maybe loopback (haven't tried loopback though)

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#234
I’m looking forward to Crystal 1) getting a critical mass of developers behind it and 2) (I consider this a deal breaker) supporting parallel programming. Then, yes, Rails, in the incarnation of its proper successor, is more relevant than ever.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#235

The need for a build environment itself limits Ruby deployment to developers. This becomes a real problem for end user apps and expecting end users to compile is perhaps expecting too much. And now you need a build environment in deployment. And with this comes potential dependency hell, an app like Discourse pulls in over 140 dependencies. This means either you are a Ruby developer who can debug compile or version c…

Docker is the answer. Hire a separate production engineer to handle docker if your devs are not interested in ops.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#236

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…

I'm expensive because I'm experienced, not because of the technology stack. I would expect to get paid the same whether I'm coding in Node or Rails.

Also, I don't think anybody is arguing that Rails can do things other stacks can't do; conversely one can also use React with a Rails backend. But I do absolutely believe that Rails generally provides faster development times, because it has pretty useful abstractions and components work well together out of the box. I can't say the same for Node.

I think your point about devs either being Node or Ruby people is misguided. I did Rails for a lot of years, but have been doing Node for the past 2. It's not because I "made the switch", it's because the job I took was a Node shop. Knowing languages and frameworks is not mutually exclusive.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#237
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).

> Yup, but why?

Mobile and mobile-first thinking, perhaps. "webdev" is far more js-driven than it was 10-15 years ago. I'm not sure whether that's good or bad, but imo that accounts for much of the difference. 15 years ago I could build entire applications with a minimum of JS, and they were acceptable to clients. That's not really the case any more - there's more demand/need/expectation of js in web projects today.

The need to talk to relational database is, ime, as strong as ever, while the need for supplemental data stores is growing, but is rarely the primary focus for any system already in existence.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#238
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the types argument is bullshit but it's just my opinion. Do python or ruby devs really feel they are less productive than java devs because they have no types? What I see happening is languages like java becoming more dynamic (var etc) and languages like ruby/python getting better IDEs (auto completion will continue to improve).

I don't know about ruby and python but in JS there a significant number of projects that aim at adding a type system on top of the launguage

Python 3 has type annotations and there are static type analyzers for it.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#239
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think an all-in-one framework is an advantage? As soon as you want to switch something out you end up fighting the framework and the tutorials. Better to start with dedicated libraries that each do one thing - it's inevitably where you're going to end up. (Not that I'd consider an untyped ecosystem in the first place, especially one as fond of "magic" (e.g. monkeypatching) as rails. I have sympathy for jus…

> Why do you think an all-in-one framework is an advantage? Because it has allowed the community to develop a whole lot of well-integrated, batteries-included libraries that span the from the model layer to the frontend.

I hate to break it to you, but Rails doesn’t span the frontend. Hell, the frontend isn’t even written in the same language.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#240

Apologies for the length here, but it seems like programming language and stack philosophy discussions simply require obscene amounts of length to produce fully-rational arguments. Trying to cut back invariably forces you to end the journey to philosophical truth with subjectively-felt emotion. Would appreciate feedback on what could be removed without compromising legibility. Programmers generally overvalue the util…

I also want to comment that I miss Rails while working in Node. The node ecosystem feels like a giant hash table. It's really hard to figure out where things belong except to memorize it.

Also choosing the right node module for the job can be hard. There are often 4-5 modules doing the same thing, all of them claiming to be the best, yet most of them not being that good at all.
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