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Ruby on Rails: The Documentary [video]

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Re: Ruby on Rails: The Documentary [video]

#121
post #105
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if you open up any Rails application, it looks basically the same in structure whether it is the biggest Rails app there is or a new one I've never worked with Rails, but this sounds amazing. One of the things I really hate about the Node.js ecosystem is that there are no clear conventions, the structure is always different even when the same framework is used. It's a mess. The exception is probably Next.js but it's…

Not "any" but "most". I've worked for a company whose RoR codebase/structure looked completely different from the usual because they used a Domain Driven Design-inspired architecture.

I really liked the DDD book, but I think that many of the suggestions mostly apply to huge "do it all" enterprise applications, which are also not the best fit for Rails. So I think it's OK if you can't easily apply those patterns to a Rails app - if you actually need to build a single enterprise application to rule them all, you should probably choose a different framework anyway.

Re: Ruby on Rails: The Documentary [video]

#122

Two figures that inspired me were missing, why the lucky stiff and Ryan Bates from railcasts fame. Otherwise great docu with DHH "f*uk you" slide which does give an insight into successful open source projects.

Ryan Bates is a legend

I think he heard us...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38253485

Re: Ruby on Rails: The Documentary [video]

#123

I had a lot of fun watching this documentary. The one person framework really comes out in the personal story of Toby from Shopify. "From Hello World to IPO". What I also loved is that he mentioned that if you open up any Rails application, it looks basically the same in structure whether it is the biggest Rails app there is or a new one. Sure that can be true for many apps, but in a world of, for example, APIs and f…

I'm going to have go push back on this.

I don't like the RoR community, not because they're bad people, but because I think they're insane from a tech perspective.

I only occasionally pick up RoR work because of how off-putting my first experience was. But what makes it worse is that every project I've been on (including one I just started on a few weeks ago) has just been a cluster.

What you're saying here is true in theory, but what you're not telling people is how the community is about as close to the attitude of npm as you can get on the server side. hundreds of gems on your typical application, many of which are used in 1 or 2 places, helping avoid a grand total of less than 5 lines of code.

Then there's the ratwheel you opt into with rails. Every single damned time I find myself having to manually patch libraries to get it working properly. I even once had to track down an old Ubuntu image of a version that had EoL'd 5 years prior and THEN had to manually patch a few C dependencies just to get it to build and run.

Don't even get me started on wkhtmltopdf, fuck that dependency. If you use that in your RoR project, fuck you.

^ that's only partially meant to be humourous.

My experience is that developers suggest RoR then run off into the sunset on their new project, leaving companies not understanding that they're now on a ratwheel of maintenance and upgrades until it's so bad only someone such as myself even has the skillset necessary to pick up the pieces.

Contrast this with asp.net core. Each LTS version is supported for 2 years (which is too short imo), but more importantly, you can install the EOL versions just fine. I would never recommend RoR over asp.net core (asp.net 6+ ... LTS only) because developer productivity isn't worth the maintenance cost.

Re: Ruby on Rails: The Documentary [video]

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I probably won't use it again in any projects, but I liked the video because of nostalgia. Rails is a memory of a fun and scrappier me, a different time, appropriate in its own light for my path at the time.

After doing lots of Node and Go I've recently come back to Rails and, no joke, it's about 5x faster in development for me. So many niceties. Using Prisma I had a 25 line method (and no real models) and that went down to 3 lines in Rails. It's just a night and day difference. I won't leave Rails again.

I couldn't have said it better, its impressive how much you are able to do through Rails in such a short time.

Re: Ruby on Rails: The Documentary [video]

#125
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Domain. Team. Project Planning. Combine any of them and the projects demand different things, but with Rails you are out of luck hmm, sounds like this rails app that one might have not heard bout. You should check it out. Think it's called Basecamp

help I’ve just witnessed a murder

on the off chance someone doesn't understand the subtext here.

BaseCamp is DHH's company's product. DHH is the creator of Ruby on Rails. He literally create RoR to build BaseCamp, which is exactly the type of software the other poster is claiming is problematic for RoR.

DHH is on record as having said RoR was evolved organically from the early code of BaseCamp.

Re: Ruby on Rails: The Documentary [video]

#126

I tried to like ruby and rails, but when I tried to grok the language, I found it more difficult to follow than python + js (my daily drivers). Did anyone else feel the same way? I kind of want to give it another chance bc I have some side projects that I want to try out, but I find django/python and next/react easier to grok. Maybe I should try harder? FWIW, I also want to pick up good practices when it comes to eng…

Interestingly, for me it is the exact opposite, I tried Django/Python and it's more difficult for me to grok. Somehow I just find Rails easier and more straightforward.

I've worked more in Python, but rails was way more intuitive for me than Django. I knew just how I should do everything, and if I needed to alter some functionality, I knew just where to look. I loved its consistency.

I like ruby quite a lot, too.

rails made me very fast.

Re: Ruby on Rails: The Documentary [video]

#127

I had a lot of fun watching this documentary. The one person framework really comes out in the personal story of Toby from Shopify. "From Hello World to IPO". What I also loved is that he mentioned that if you open up any Rails application, it looks basically the same in structure whether it is the biggest Rails app there is or a new one. Sure that can be true for many apps, but in a world of, for example, APIs and f…

I'm going to have go push back on this. I don't like the RoR community, not because they're bad people, but because I think they're insane from a tech perspective. I only occasionally pick up RoR work because of how off-putting my first experience was. But what makes it worse is that every project I've been on (including one I just started on a few weeks ago) has just been a cluster. What you're saying here is true i…

.NET's LTS releases are supported for 3 years and STS are supported for 18 months. I wish LTS support was 5 years, it seems like ecosystem has matured enough post-going-OSS-wild-ride starting with .NET 6 release and is ready for such a support timeframe. Or at least they could have every other LTS be ELTS?

Also, I do wonder if RoRs perceived productivity is by inertia? I have a hard time believing you can top the productivity of quick scaffolding for back-end you get circa .NET7-8?

Re: Ruby on Rails: The Documentary [video]

#128
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if you open up any Rails application, it looks basically the same in structure whether it is the biggest Rails app there is or a new one I've never worked with Rails, but this sounds amazing. One of the things I really hate about the Node.js ecosystem is that there are no clear conventions, the structure is always different even when the same framework is used. It's a mess. The exception is probably Next.js but it's…

True, nodejs really doesn't have _the_ framework. Python had flask, php is WordPress and RoR. Why is that? Especially since most of the new frameworks copy the ideas of existing frameworks. P.S. Perhaps because a JS framework based off the ideas of rails would be called jails! /s

I've built Django projects for years and wondered the same thing whenever I had to build something in Javascript land. There are some scaffolding tools that do pretty much what those frameworks do (e.g. create.t3.gg, which I've used recently for a couple of small projects and really liked) but obviously lack that feeling of cohesion that strong opinionated frameworks like Rails or Django come with.

Not sure if that's a plus or a minus, after all there might be devs whose preferred stacks differ by 1 or 2 items (e.g. prisma over drizzle, nextauth over something else) and they'd both benefit from having a standardized template to start with.

EDIT: just remembered I fell in love with Meteor for a while. Then they started shoving React and other external stuff into it to gain more market share and it inevitably lost that opinionanted nature that, IMO, made it so good. Choice isn't always a good thing for the end user (even, and sometimes especially, when that end user is a professional who just wants to get things done).

Re: Ruby on Rails: The Documentary [video]

#129
post #17

> if you open up any Rails application, it looks basically the same in structure whether it is the biggest Rails app there is or a new one. I used to love this, untill I started to hate it. I am convinced this is a major contributor to why so many Rails apps turn into an unmaintainable mess over years. Who measures onboarding in hours? It's fine if it takes a day or two to understand the domain. And the framework. An…

I don't know what exactly the complaint is here. You don't like that Rails has a common structure? > It's virtually impossible to swap AR out for anything else. I've used Mongo and a number of other ORM's, why can you not use other ORM's exactly? This just sounds like you don't like frameworks and want to build things from the ground up, because most of the complaints you make are just not true. Maybe you are just in…

because behavior is an unspoken part of contracts.

I can't reasonably swap out an array with a linked list even if the official contracts are the same.

this is why things like DAL's are created, they give you an opportunity to deal with the differences in behavior.

The issue with frameworks like RoR that use AR throughout is that the queries are sprinkled throughout the codebase, giving no opportunity to fix such behavioral differences.

What happens is every ORM then attempts some sort of "query reuse" and they do so badly because it's not possible to do it well with the contracts they expose. It creates code where you can't ever reason about the query that's actually being generated.

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