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Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth learning?

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Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth learning?

#21

Post by ydnaclementine »

I think you should as your first web framework. Ruby is fun to write, and it's easy to find and understand examples for Rails (even across versions). Rails is more opinionated so allows you to think less about project structure and more about actual business logic (might be seen as a benefit for a beginner)

The big ideas from any of the popular web frameworks (rails, django, express, etc) will be shared between the rest of them. It's really more of a question about which language do you want to use.

If you already had experience with web MVC, I would recommend something more exotic like elixir phoenix instead (1.4RC released today)

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth learning?

#22

Post by stephenhuey »

d0m wrote: post #5
excid3 wrote: post #4

Yes, of course it's still worth learning. Whether you learn Rails, Django, or anything else, the concepts will apply pretty well for any web framework. I've been making screencasts for Rails developers at GoRails ( https://gorails.com ) showing how to build various features of websites in Rails. If you're a beginner though, I would first recommend the Rails Tutorial - https://www.railstutorial.org/book

I mean, learning X is an opportunity cost. Not dismissing your answer, but I guess we could rephrase the question: "Is Rails worth learning instead of X", where X can be some other popular frameworks. Or said differently, both for newcomers or more experienced devs, why do you think Rails is worth learning instead of some other web framework?

Rails influenced some other popular web frameworks, and I feel it’s still faster to build some types of web apps in Rails. I’d think you could cover more concepts sooner and then translate what you’ve learned to other frameworks as you need them.

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth learning?

#24

Post by weliketocode »

excid3 wrote: post #4

Yes, of course it's still worth learning. Whether you learn Rails, Django, or anything else, the concepts will apply pretty well for any web framework. I've been making screencasts for Rails developers at GoRails ( https://gorails.com ) showing how to build various features of websites in Rails. If you're a beginner though, I would first recommend the Rails Tutorial - https://www.railstutorial.org/book

I'm sure your stuff is great, and I'll happily give a look or two... but you are openly advertising your stuff without really answering the OP.

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth learning?

#25

Post by briandear »

tptacek wrote: post #20

The answer is probably that parts of Rails are worth knowing, and other parts aren't. ActiveRecord and the Rails Controller/Model/Routing system are as good as anything in the serverside framework world. A few years back people might have started saying that AR was in danger of being obsoleted by "modern" databases, but SQL (and particularly Postgres) has come roaring back, and AR remains one of the best (arguably th…

Why React over rails front-end? It seems like it adds undue complication. What’s the real benefit? Basecamp works great and it’s a rails front end. Rails make full stack development pretty easy.

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth learning?

#26

Post by zumu »

hosh wrote: post #17
BillinghamJ wrote: post #12

I'd definitely say no. Going from little knowledge straight into Rails teaches terrible habits imo, and indeed it doesn't tend to be used for new projects much any more. When you're learning to find your feet with software engineering, I'd strongly recommend avoiding languages where the emphasis on everything being "magic". It doesn't help you learn how things actually work.

Unless you dig into the magic to learn how it works.

Arguably digging into Rails source code will

> teach... terrible habits imo

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth learning?

#27

Post by hosh »

RoR, for all of its flaws, influenced many other frameworks. It is still very popular, though I'd also say, it is on a slow decline. The takeaways are:

  1. How to create a good experience for developers

  2. Taking care to refine syntax, patterns, and architecture

  3. If you understand how the Rails is put together, you'd generally know how many frameworks are put together.
However, there are some other options.

  1. Many Rubyists and Rails developers had jumped over to using Elixir and Phoenix; that platform

  2. Others have started experimenting with Rust, Go, Crystal, etc. after knowing the flaws of the Rails platform

  3. However, the Rubyists who jump to a different platform often bring in the things they learned from Ruby to apply to the new platform. For example, Elixir is primarily built around a powerful macro system that allows for refining the syntax, while taking advantage of what the Erlang/OTP environment.

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth learning?

#28

Post by rst »

tptacek wrote: post #20

The answer is probably that parts of Rails are worth knowing, and other parts aren't. ActiveRecord and the Rails Controller/Model/Routing system are as good as anything in the serverside framework world. A few years back people might have started saying that AR was in danger of being obsoleted by "modern" databases, but SQL (and particularly Postgres) has come roaring back, and AR remains one of the best (arguably th…

Worth noting that webpack (via the webpacker gem) is supported in Rails 5.2, and will be default in Rails 6; using that gets you access to current versions of React, Redux, and pretty much anything else packaged as npm modules. You still need some kind of view layer to serve up the pages that invoke the JS, but if what you're doing is a single-page app that's almost all React, then that view layer doesn't actually have to do very much.

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth learning?

#29

Post by tibbon »

I work daily in rails and have for years. It's a great platform to learn from.

Honestly, I don't enjoy using the front end parts of Rails, and even on the back end side of things there's a lot of non-standard things that are good to do in order to make an actually scalable and long-lived app. But that doesn't mean it isn't worth using.

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth learning?

#30

Post by matthewmacleod »

tptacek wrote: post #20

The answer is probably that parts of Rails are worth knowing, and other parts aren't. ActiveRecord and the Rails Controller/Model/Routing system are as good as anything in the serverside framework world. A few years back people might have started saying that AR was in danger of being obsoleted by "modern" databases, but SQL (and particularly Postgres) has come roaring back, and AR remains one of the best (arguably th…

the inscrutable asset pipeline

This has basically all been replaced by Webpack so I’m not so sure

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