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From Ruby to Node: Overhauling Shopify’s CLI for a better developer experience

shopify.engineering

61–70 of 109 posts

Re: From Ruby to Node: Overhauling Shopify’s CLI for a better developer experience

#61

I don't understand going from Ruby to JS. Go or Rust sure, but Node for CLI? What is gained by doing that lateral move?

Developers who'll work right out of school, is my guess. Rails is great for the people who used it during that generation, and still is, I'm told. JS offers cheaper and more plentiful talent, and doesn't require as big of a mind shift as rust. If they become more JS centric, given the overlap in JS and Rust ideology, I could absolutely see them involving Rust soon after.

Re: From Ruby to Node: Overhauling Shopify’s CLI for a better developer experience

#62

Cool. But god, the Shopify CLI / developer experience has degraded so much in the past few years. With the newest iteration, they want a full app re-structure just to work with the CLI properly. It is absolutely brutal. Sure, before they had basically no tooling, but then they had some basic ones that everyone was basically happy with, and then they just decided to iterate too much. (saying this as a ~ 8 year long Pa…

This is where I'm at right now. We have 40000 items on the store and I'm writing an updater for it, and the entire official ecosystem is a dumpster fire.

I've found some ok golang api clients which seem to do the trick so far.

Re: From Ruby to Node: Overhauling Shopify’s CLI for a better developer experience

#64

I don't understand going from Ruby to JS. Go or Rust sure, but Node for CLI? What is gained by doing that lateral move?

Tooling is much better, for starters. And they plan to use TS, not JS, did you even read the article?

Re: From Ruby to Node: Overhauling Shopify’s CLI for a better developer experience

#66
post #47

Questionable decision making. Why not use Go when minimizing runtime dependencies is first priority? I’d probably just have cleaned up the Ruby code and used something like Ruby-Packer to create binaries. When typing is so important why not use rbs? Makes no sense to me.

Rbs doesn’t hold a candle to TS.

Re: From Ruby to Node: Overhauling Shopify’s CLI for a better developer experience

#67
It's possible to write CLI tools with support generic plugins in static languages: drop in {{name}}-{{extension}} executables in a private vendored plugins/bin directory. docker for 1, cargo for another.

At MAANGs, Rust is taking over and Go is waning. Go allows for quick productivity from 0 but it plateaus due to an unwillingness to add features. Rust has a Haskell/Nix/(fancy tool) problem but it has a good productivity curve that keeps going. Sometimes worse is better as UNIX people might recall.

Re: From Ruby to Node: Overhauling Shopify’s CLI for a better developer experience

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My read on this is they just wanted to cut out Ruby and do everything in Node. That's fine as a decision, but rest of the article feels like just trying to justify it after the fact. Like someone at the top decided, now lets pretend it's a good decision. As you mentioned, if they're not OK with CLI, they could refactor in Ruby. The whole "embracing functional programming" and MVC architecture (i think Rails when i he…

> Like someone at the top decided, now lets pretend it's a good decision. It might not even be a top thing, if they migrated internal eng from Ruby to node internally I would not be surprised if this was dev-driven either

Interesting how Shopify went from the most pro-ruby company to what looks like unreasonably rapid divestment from it. Wonder what's going on.
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