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Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

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Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#21

Post by zik »

ajmurmann wrote: post #14
gigatexal wrote: post #5

I would have thought rails to golang so I too am surprised. I wish I had millions and could be a patron saint of sorts for people like the author. Open source funding is so broken as the companies that build upon the vast open source and often free software don’t do much in the way of donating or otherwise supporting the companies or individuals behind the projects.

Ruby has developer happiness as one of its main goals. Go on the other hand seems to have a lot of narratives around keeping the language small even if it's inconvenient. Add to that that Rust with Cargo has a package manager that will fell just like home to Ruby devs, whereas Go brought package managing back to the dark ages. => All this makes it hard to get excited about Go. Rust on the other hand comes with a bunc…

I don't think the "lot of narratives" you're talking about actually exist. I've never heard anyone from the Go camp say that they want to make the language "small even if it's inconvenient". From a language design point of view I think they're trying to make it small to maximise convenience. Yes, it's a different philosophy to "kitchen sink" languages but that doesn't make it wrong. In fact it's considered a gold standard of language design. Wikipedia says:

> Orthogonality in a programming language means that a relatively small set of primitive constructs can be combined in a relatively small number of ways to build the control and data structures of the language[2]. It is associated with simplicity; the more orthogonal the design, the fewer exceptions. This makes it easier to learn, read and write programs in a programming language. The meaning of an orthogonal feature is independent of context; the key parameters are symmetry and consistency (for example, a pointer is an orthogonal concept).

Go modules are a fairly new feature which addresses past criticisms of Go dependency management so I don't think that's a valid criticism any more.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#22

Post by grogenaut »

learc83 wrote: post #12
dleslie wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps critically, it lacks an official Windows distribution and support.

Is anyone deploying anything other than .NET on windows for webdev though?

I work on windows boxes all the time for go development it works great for that. Docker / Docker machine cause issues, and I can't use HyperV because I also have to be able to run android emulator.

However every time I've looked at crystal I've stopped because there's no windows version. I have to have a gaming PC and I only use editors and languages that work on windows mac and linux so I don't hamstring myself or anyone I'm working with.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#23

Post by grogenaut »

ajmurmann wrote: post #13
dleslie wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps critically, it lacks an official Windows distribution and support.

Is this really an issue for most devs moving from Ruby? I don't think I have ever run Ruby on Windows or talked to anyone who did.

In 2008 when I did rails I was always annoyed that the dev tools heavily favored mac but you deployed to linux. No end of issues with native gems and deploys. I don't think I was using windows back then.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#24

Post by learc83 »

grogenaut wrote: post #22
learc83 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is anyone deploying anything other than .NET on windows for webdev though?

I work on windows boxes all the time for go development it works great for that. Docker / Docker machine cause issues, and I can't use HyperV because I also have to be able to run android emulator. However every time I've looked at crystal I've stopped because there's no windows version. I have to have a gaming PC and I only use editors and languages that work on windows mac and linux so I don't hamstring myself or a…

>However every time I've looked at crystal I've stopped because there's no windows version. I have to have a gaming PC and I only use editors and languages that work on windows mac and linux so I don't hamstring myself or anyone I'm working with.

I have a gaming PC too and I run my editor and browser etc... in windows, but I have a Linux server where the software I'm developing actually lives and runs (if it's something web based and not designed to run on windows).

I can't for the life of me figure out why you would actually run your development environment on a drastically different OS than what you're deploying to unless you absolutely have to. You're just asking to introduce an entirely avoidable class of bugs.

I have done it btw, Go software developed for Raspberry PI on windows, but I definitely wouldn't do it again.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#25

Post by pault »

learc83 wrote: post #18
pault wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of folks have to use Windows machines at their day jobs.

If they're not deploying on windows though, there isn't much reason to develop on it.

That's what I'm saying. It's not uncommon for companies to have AWS linux infrastructure for deployment but give everyone windows laptops for development. Don't ask me, ask the IT department.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#26

Post by geowwy »

fizx wrote: post #9
freehunter wrote: post #2

I’ve seen a number of people move from Rails to Rust... is that really a common move? Seems like they’re very different and designed for very different things. Are people commonly building web applications in Rust? I know it’s possible but C++ has web frameworks too and that seems like a more apt comparison. I guess I’m just baffled by the number of people on here that I see pointing to Rust as the next project they…

I think it's less about the working style and more about the promise of working in the future(tm). When Rails 0.9 dropped in 2004, I instantly rewrote my old PHP app in it and never looked back. It just felt so expressive and naturally declarative. Rust has a similar amount of promise, though not quite as good of a demo. The idea that you can write high-performance code without typical high-performance code bugs is a…

  > The idea that you can write high-performance code without
  > typical high-performance code bugs is amazing! There's a whole
  > new type of type system that ensures it!
I just can't see how Rust is a good choice for web dev. There's a lot of mental overhead to writing Rust. Something like C#/Kotlin/Go will avoid all the same bugs and give you 95% of the performance while being much easier to code.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#27

Post by james_s_tayler »

grogenaut wrote: post #22
learc83 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is anyone deploying anything other than .NET on windows for webdev though?

I work on windows boxes all the time for go development it works great for that. Docker / Docker machine cause issues, and I can't use HyperV because I also have to be able to run android emulator. However every time I've looked at crystal I've stopped because there's no windows version. I have to have a gaming PC and I only use editors and languages that work on windows mac and linux so I don't hamstring myself or a…

Just run a Linux dev VM in VMware. Best of all worlds. You have your Windows gaming PC and you can develop on it in Linux.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#28

Post by geowwy »

grogenaut wrote: post #23
ajmurmann wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this really an issue for most devs moving from Ruby? I don't think I have ever run Ruby on Windows or talked to anyone who did.

In 2008 when I did rails I was always annoyed that the dev tools heavily favored mac but you deployed to linux. No end of issues with native gems and deploys. I don't think I was using windows back then.

Rails is still very much develop on Mac/deploy to Linux. Although I think developing on Windows and Linux is easier these days.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#29

Post by adrianN »

geowwy wrote: post #26
fizx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's less about the working style and more about the promise of working in the future(tm). When Rails 0.9 dropped in 2004, I instantly rewrote my old PHP app in it and never looked back. It just felt so expressive and naturally declarative. Rust has a similar amount of promise, though not quite as good of a demo. The idea that you can write high-performance code without typical high-performance code bugs is a…

> The idea that you can write high-performance code without > typical high-performance code bugs is amazing! There's a whole > new type of type system that ensures it! I just can't see how Rust is a good choice for web dev. There's a lot of mental overhead to writing Rust. Something like C#/Kotlin/Go will avoid all the same bugs and give you 95% of the performance while being much easier to code.

Rust also promises concurrency without data races.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#30

Post by tlrobinson »

freehunter wrote: post #2

I’ve seen a number of people move from Rails to Rust... is that really a common move? Seems like they’re very different and designed for very different things. Are people commonly building web applications in Rust? I know it’s possible but C++ has web frameworks too and that seems like a more apt comparison. I guess I’m just baffled by the number of people on here that I see pointing to Rust as the next project they…

It seems fairly common for a small number of prominent members of some community to move on to a new technology and have a number of people follow them for various (good and probably not good) reasons.

I'm not that familiar with Rails or Rust, but Steve Klabnik (http://www.rustforrubyists.com/) and Yehuda Katz come to mind in this case (https://blog.rust-lang.org/2014/12/12/Core-Team.html).

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