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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?

#31

Post by hnzix »

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

Thanks so much for your screencasts. I'm cooking up a MVP in Rails on a really tight timeframe and they've been invaluable.

To address OP, Rails is now a boring tech and that's a good thing. I can move quickly and for every roadblock there's a community answer. It feels like React tutorials become obsolete after 4 months.

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

#32

Post by chaostheory »

Rails is a good framework and Ruby is a great language. I still use both. However, given limited time, I would advise someone new to learn Javascript / Typescript & a framework based on that instead. Why?

1. You will need to learn it anyways

2. It's powerful being able to use one language for both the front and back end. Context changes harm productivity.

3. Javascript & Typescript are the future and both are evolving really fast.

4. The Node.js ecosystem is already pretty mature with a lot of 3rd party libraries.

5. Performance is really good compared to languages like Ruby, Python, or PHP. For near the same simplicity and terseness, you get something with way better performance.

The only downside for beginners is that while the Nodejs world has a ton of libraries and frameworks, there isn't really a dominant framework similar to Rails that provides everything and the kitchen sink as well as a single 'right way' to do everything. The closest thing is Express, but it's really lacking; it's similar to Sinatra. Having to deal with a ton of possible choices and directions for development is just terrible for beginners, which is why Rails is still worth it to learn as your first framework.

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

#33

Post by hosh »

briandear wrote: post #25
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.

React buys you two things: (1) reusable components (2) React Native

https://thinkster.io/tutorials/what-exactly-is-react

It's major criticism: there is a kernel of truth in the joke that React is a dressed-up PHP (in the sense of how you put the components together)

Some other options are Vue and Elm.

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

#34

Post by matthewmacleod »

Yes. It’s pretty useful for building most kinds of common web services. Lessons learned will translate well to othe tools, and in particular it will help you to avoid making some common mistakes while getting to grips with the nuts and bolts of web applications.

Don’t panic about it “losing popularity.” Tools and techniques learned using one framework are pretty generally applicable to others.

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

#35

Post by tptacek »

hosh wrote: post #33
briandear wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

React buys you two things: (1) reusable components (2) React Native https://thinkster.io/tutorials/what-exactly-is-react It's major criticism: there is a kernel of truth in the joke that React is a dressed-up PHP (in the sense of how you put the components together) Some other options are Vue and Elm.

It's been a long time since I wrote or even had to look at PHP, but I have done work in PHP. I use React constantly. I do not see any similarities between the two, like, at all.

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

#36

Post by mrdoops »

I started learning Ruby/Rails early last year. After building a couple projects in Rails for some clients, I switched to learning Elixir/Phoenix instead. Rails has a lot of magic and implicit behavior you need to learn to use effectively. I still love Ruby; the ecosystem is very mature and stable and the language is just so damn expressive.

I switched largely because of the applications I wanted to build were very 'Reactive' and message/event driven. Elixir being an Erlang/Actor-Model derivative with the expressiveness of Ruby was a perfect fit.

Elixir's ecosystem and community hasn't had as much time to develop as Ruby, but it's still very capable and you're not going to run into scalability problems.

If your goal is to skill up and get a job asap, maybe Elixir isn't ready yet, but I'd pick it over anything else to build a greenfield application in.

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

#39

Post by hnzix »

briandear wrote: post #25
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.

You can have the best of both worlds and use webpacker to mix React or VueJS into the Rails frontend where it makes sense, eg complex forms or widgets. Many webapps are not Facebookish and don't need to be SPA blobs, with all the additional complexity, SEO and accessibility costs.
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