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Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?

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Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?

#121

Post by mostertoaster »

I have a love hate relationship with rails.

I think rails is quite powerful and great for prototyping. But I’ve noticed lots of rails developers optimize so heavily for making things DRY, they make the most hard to debug monstrosities full of meta programming all so they could write a thing one one line of code instead of 3.

Still for starting out it’s pretty awesome.

If your company grows enough that you have legacy data models that no longer fit the designs demanded by customers - First: congratulations, that is awesome. Second: you are either going to want to be very careful how you add new things to your legacy data models, and how you define your boundaries, OR consider migrating off rails. If you start just slapping things on whatever data model is most convenient, to keep up with demands from product, you are going to be in a world of hurt that will take exponentially longer and longer to get out of.

Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?

#123

Post by wyclif »

muzani wrote: post #28
tra3 wrote: post #11

Yes, I would. In fact, I'd use any boring technology [0]. Anything that's been around and battle tested. If I was at a startup trying to solve a business problem, the last thing I'd want to do is bruise my knuckles fighting with my tools. Rails provides an opinionated way to structure your codebase as well as many existing modules that just work. It's not exclusive in this space, but it's a safe bet. You can get any…

Is it boring technology? I'm actually reluctant to pick up Rails because it had always been sold by the Basecamp cult and Jason Fried gives off Musk vibes. Many opinionated frameworks are also less reliable because of the layers of abstraction, so I'd also associate opinionated framework = sexy and temporary. I've never actually used Rails in production, just did some tutorial, so I'm probably wrong about this.

>it had always been sold by the Basecamp cult and Jason Fried gives off Musk vibes.

Not affiliated with either of those things, but what does this even mean? Basecamp is a business. Jason Fried is a businessman. Basecamp is a product developed by 37 Signals, a company Fried co-founded.

How does any of that create "Musk vibes"? I'm seriously wondering what this is all about.

Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?

#124

Post by wyclif »

kowfm wrote: post #109
anonfordays wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The Jason Fried and David Hansson Musk/Fascist vibes are real and are a problem. What do you mean by this? Where have Jason Fried or David Hansson supported fascism? Your account is ten years old and this is the first comment you've ever made.

It doesn't mean I'm not right. I mean that they give off Fascist vibes, and that it's a problem. Adoration for and support of fascist people and regimes are implicit support of fascism. Not explicit. Go read their blogs, I'm sure you'll find lots of examples.

>I mean that they give off Fascist vibes, and that it's a problem

But you've just repeated the accusation and said that you think it's a problem. You haven't provided proof of any actual fascism.

Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?

#125

Post by wyclif »

muzani wrote: post #113
anonfordays wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm actually reluctant to pick up Rails because it had always been sold by the Basecamp cult and Jason Fried gives off Musk vibes. Why? What "Musk vibes" have they given off?

Success because of A and attributing it to B. There's a bit of megalomania too. He has a beef against VC funding. He lost 1/3 of staff once when he implemented a policy of no personal opinions at Basecamp. He is often shared because of his unpopular opinions and his successes are used to fortify those opinions. I'm not saying Fried or Musk are wrong, and they both have brilliant insights at times. If Musk was crazy a…

>he implemented a policy of no personal opinions at Basecamp

Except he didn't do that, what he implemented was not making personal politics a part of Basecamp's workplace culture, which is a much more moderate thing than what you're accusing him of here.

You might not be aware of this, but it's possible to have a personal opinion about something and not bring societal and political discussions to the company account or forum. Here's the text of the new policy:

https://world.hey.com/jason/changes-at-basecamp-7f32afc5

"People can take the conversations with willing co-workers to Signal, Whatsapp, or even a personal Basecamp account, but it can't happen where the work happens anymore."

Again, this is not at all the same thing as "no personal opinions [allowed] at Basecamp."

Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?

#126

Post by AshTeriyaki »

Honestly, and it’s a meme at this point, I think it’s the best choice. Nothing to so with how much I like it. You can just get things done SO quickly. And with the focus on convention, that first attempt is an awful lot better than in other frameworks. You really can get done in a few hours what has previously taken days. I don’t think it’s entirely coincidence that a pretty big proportion of the biggest winners of the 2000-10s internet gold rush either started out with (and a lot still are using) Rails. If you’re more agile with a smaller team, it’s a benefit to any business. The scale argument is overblown, but also fewer devs being more productive is much more important than relatively minor increases in infrastructure cost

Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?

#127

Post by anonfordays »

kowfm wrote: post #109
anonfordays wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The Jason Fried and David Hansson Musk/Fascist vibes are real and are a problem. What do you mean by this? Where have Jason Fried or David Hansson supported fascism? Your account is ten years old and this is the first comment you've ever made.

It doesn't mean I'm not right. I mean that they give off Fascist vibes, and that it's a problem. Adoration for and support of fascist people and regimes are implicit support of fascism. Not explicit. Go read their blogs, I'm sure you'll find lots of examples.

>It doesn't mean I'm not right.

It doesn't mean you're not wrong. Is this a personal vendetta?

>I mean that they give off Fascist vibes, and that it's a problem. Adoration for and support of fascist people and regimes are implicit support of fascism.

Where? Link examples where they supported Fascism. "Vibes" are meaningless, I need specific examples of these claims, else they can be tossed outright.

>Go read their blogs, I'm sure you'll find lots of examples.

Didn't find anything about supporting Fascism.

Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?

#128

Post by hedgehog0 »

phaedryx wrote: post #77
hedgehog0 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're doing AI stuff, any Python framework will be best. I understand that AI stuff now is mainly Python. But is it possible to connect Rails with some Python program/service, is this one of the purpose of microservices?

I work for a company that uses Rails. We don't have any Python code, but we use a lot of AI.

Thank you for your reply. In your other comment, you mention that you know Ruby relatively well. Would you recommend learning Ruby along side with Rails (i.e., learning Ruby in/with Rails), if I have some experience with other languages, such as Java, Python, C/C++, Lisp, and so on?

Also are there any Ruby AI libraries that you would recommend? Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?

#129

Post by nickserv »

robertlagrant wrote: post #59
nickserv wrote: post #52

I would not. I've used PHP, Python, Go, JS/TS, and Ruby in production with small to medium teams. Teams that I managed on occasion and recruited, to a certain extent. RoR is great at first but in my experience quickly becomes full of hard to diagnose bugs, its magic metaprogramming seems too tempting for developers to use and leads to all sorts of problems. There is a lack of good quality, well maintenained 3rd party…

> If you need to hire a sizeable team quickly, I would reach for Node or PHP. I always wonder about this. Surely the technology you pick influences the size of the team.

There is definitely some link to the technology and developer productivity, and therefore team size.

It's true that statically typed, compiled languages tend to take more time to ship a similar feature, than loosely typed dynamic languages.

But beyond small projects, team size is more dependent on the number of features to ship.

That is to say, as code complexity increases, the choice of language on team size matters less.

Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?

#130

Post by nickserv »

hedgehog0 wrote: post #69
nickserv wrote: post #52

I would not. I've used PHP, Python, Go, JS/TS, and Ruby in production with small to medium teams. Teams that I managed on occasion and recruited, to a certain extent. RoR is great at first but in my experience quickly becomes full of hard to diagnose bugs, its magic metaprogramming seems too tempting for developers to use and leads to all sorts of problems. There is a lack of good quality, well maintenained 3rd party…

> If you're doing AI stuff, any Python framework will be best. I understand that AI stuff now is mainly Python. But is it possible to connect Rails with some Python program/service, is this one of the purpose of microservices?

Yes, of course. One of the Ruby shops I worked for did exactly this.

But why add the extra complexity? Ruby and Python are similar enough in terms of productivity and processing time that there's no reason to do this IMHO.

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