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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?

#41

Post by dirkdk »

For early stage development, Rails is still the best. No ORM tool out there is as powerful as ActiveRecord. Front ends are nowadays built more with React/Redux, which is well supported via Webpacker. And for basic admin pages, regular controller calls with validations and ERB/Haml/Slim templates works great. And GraphQL is fully supported via gems.

When you look for performance for microservices, Go or Scala are better. But that's when you are beyond the first 2 years and 25 developers and have the cash to invest

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

#43

Post by citilife »

I'm still most productive in Ruby on Rails, I learned it after previously using Go, PHP, and Python (Django and Flask) for web development. Far and away Rails allows me to be more productive, and it's still being actively developed. I've used Node.js and some other frameworks since, but personal projects always come back to Rails.

It's up to you, what I will say, is Rails is (in my opinion) the easiest to get started with and easiest to maintain.

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

#44

Post by codyb »

I don't have as detailed an answer as several of the other commenters here, but as someone in the job market at the moment I see a decent amount of Rails work floating around.

Another framework that seems to have been burgeoning in enthusiasm lately is Phoenix, built in Elixir which is a Ruby like syntax. The neat thing there is that it introduces a ton of interesting OTP concepts borrowed from Erlang (both Erlang and Elixir compile down to bytecode for the same virtual machine, the beam).

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

#45

Post by GavinMcG »

joshmn wrote: post #3

Depends: * Do you like to be able to build things fast? * Do you prefer not having to reinvent the wheel? * Do you care if it's not the new hotness? If you answered no to any of those, run away! Rails is mature-ish. It's boring now. Its ecosystem is stable. Your sanity won't be tested. Reads... * Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial is probably the book you'll want to read to get a simple grasp on Rails (it can be overwhel…

Your third question should be inverted: if you do care that it's not the new hotness, run away. I think you meant something like "Is it okay that it's not the new hotness?"

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

#47

Post by jppope »

mattgibson wrote: post #7
jppope wrote: post #6

Wow. Really going for a trigger with the title.(you should get a lot of activity) The answer that you will unconditionally see to this question will be "it depends"... I would get more specific with your question so that you can extract a bit of wisdom from the answers. Rails is and has been a dominant web framework for the last ~10 years, dhh and the people working on it have crafted a wonderfully useful tool, with…

Curious as to whether you have found a better Rails-type framework or have moved on to a different type of dev work that you prefer. Any recommendations?

In a "philosophical" move I've gone into the micro-framework realm for web stuff, and of late that means mainly a Serverless Node.js (w/ ES7) set up which is similar to the OpenAPI/swagger (w/ koa) stuff I was doing a bit ago. Also some flask.

I'm mainly trying to do things with as little code as possible that are lightweight with almost no devops. Things like static site generators, Vue w/ Serverless Framework, Flask... which do have limitations... but they are tradeoffs that I'm comfortable with, and I know the work arounds.

At work for my last two W2/Employee gigs our main codebases were Laravel and Rails. Lots of advantages, but they come with tradeoffs.

My main recommendation is that you need to find what fits for your situation. Frameworks, IMO, are more than a set of technical choices they are cultures and shared sets of values. Which is why Rails didn't really fit for me. I'd argue that I'm a fair to mediocre developer... and I care more about the thing I am building rather that what I am building with. So I try my best to keep the code out of my way. JS kind of helps me do that because I don't need to flip my brain around so much between syntax, and it has arguably the most resources for getting over challenges. What I lose is speed (compared to Go, Java, C) and that I have to be really good at evaluating resources/ repos (Rails/ Laravel pretty much do this for you).

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

#48

Post by ctrager »

I would say yes, because I don't know of a better learning resource for "learning web develeopment", especially for somebody starting at zero, teaching oneself, than the Rails Tutorial: https://www.railstutorial.org/book.

Rails aside, what would be the best tool for "learning web development" starting from zero?

I ask because people ask me and so far I've been sending beginners to the Rails Tutorial.

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

#49

Post by ctrager »

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.

So, what actual book/tutorial would you recommend for somebody who wanted to learn web development? Regardless of the problems with Rails itself, what's a better learning path that the Rails Tutorial?

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

#50

Post by tptacek »

noobermin wrote: post #13
stanislavb wrote: post #2

If you want to - be very employable => JS/Express/[a-myriad-of-other-things] - be able to do anything (including trending AI/ML) => Python/Django (you won't be as productive as with Ruby/Rails and won't the same happiness experience [in regards to web]) - be very productive in Web env & enojoy your time => Ruby on Rails

How does working with Django translate to being able to work in ML? Merely due to Tensorflow having a python interface?

It's a running joke at my company (we consult for startups) that no matter what stack they build on, they'll always have a small team of people writing in Python for data science. Which is presumably where that's coming from. It is indeed a sort of de facto standard.

But that's not at all to say that learning Django or Python will get you a data science job; the underlying domain-specific data-science stuff is much harder to learn and qualify for than the Python is.

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