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Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

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Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#31

Post by AstroBen »

kybishop wrote: post #18
ukprogrammer wrote: post #12

The productivity of Rails for B2B 'CRUD' software is unmatched. Surprised to not see more newer startups make use of it!

After programming with elixir and phoenix for a few years (with many prior years of rails experience) I have a hard time seeing why one would choose rails. Elixir is more performant, has compiler safety guarantees that are only getting better as types are introduced, is actually designed from the ground up for web dev (being based on the Erlang VM), and... it's just way more fun (subjective I know). Elixir is what I…

If you're looking for something to invest in for the long term I think Rails wins by a mile. They have the funding, investment and strong companies dependent on it to keep it marching forward - both the framework and surrounding libraries

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#32

Post by camcil »

ukprogrammer wrote: post #12

The productivity of Rails for B2B 'CRUD' software is unmatched. Surprised to not see more newer startups make use of it!

What caused the drop in popularity in RoR? It seemed like ~10-12 years ago RoR was the de-facto startup standard. On any given day there were multiple items on the HN front page having something to do with RoR.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#33

Post by [deleted] »

camcil wrote: post #32
ukprogrammer wrote: post #12

The productivity of Rails for B2B 'CRUD' software is unmatched. Surprised to not see more newer startups make use of it!

What caused the drop in popularity in RoR? It seemed like ~10-12 years ago RoR was the de-facto startup standard. On any given day there were multiple items on the HN front page having something to do with RoR.

[deleted]

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#34

Post by jerf »

rco8786 wrote: post #14
nurettin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire 2012 scene used Rails. Then they realized it was hard to scale and rewrote everything in Go.

> Then they realized it was hard to scale A rumor perpetuated by exactly one company - Twitter. I know because I was there when it happened and helped dismantle the original monolith. Rails scales just fine for 99%+ of business cases. If you're doing a sustained 5k writes per second with bursts up to 100k...sure maybe you need something more specialized.

Rails has been around for time to change the calculus on it too. It came out in 2004. The smallest instances you can get today on AWS would have counted as fairly powerful servers back then (with insanely fast CPUs), and by the second or third smallest you're beyond anything available at the time, and there's still room to run after that.

Even the slowest web frameworks running on modern hardware take some quite substantial load before they're a problem. It's good when choosing a framework to consider if you're doing stuff where that might be a problem, but it's also good not to overestimate the performance needs for your site.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#35

Post by AstroBen »

camcil wrote: post #32
ukprogrammer wrote: post #12

The productivity of Rails for B2B 'CRUD' software is unmatched. Surprised to not see more newer startups make use of it!

What caused the drop in popularity in RoR? It seemed like ~10-12 years ago RoR was the de-facto startup standard. On any given day there were multiple items on the HN front page having something to do with RoR.

the allure of the new and shiny

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#36

Post by vinceguidry »

camcil wrote: post #32
ukprogrammer wrote: post #12

The productivity of Rails for B2B 'CRUD' software is unmatched. Surprised to not see more newer startups make use of it!

What caused the drop in popularity in RoR? It seemed like ~10-12 years ago RoR was the de-facto startup standard. On any given day there were multiple items on the HN front page having something to do with RoR.

NodeJS and the siren's song of using the same language on the server as the client.

Despite the popularity, node never caught up with rails in terms of features and productivity. I was part of a replatforming from rails to node some 10 years ago. So many things we had to just rewrite because there was no option at the time in node. The team lead that made the decision left half-way through the project. Second worst thing to happen to me in my career, after covid of course.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#37

Post by kybishop »

bhaak wrote: post #29
kybishop wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After programming with elixir and phoenix for a few years (with many prior years of rails experience) I have a hard time seeing why one would choose rails. Elixir is more performant, has compiler safety guarantees that are only getting better as types are introduced, is actually designed from the ground up for web dev (being based on the Erlang VM), and... it's just way more fun (subjective I know). Elixir is what I…

Rails might be 90% better for webdev than the rest while Elixir might be 95% better. Talk about diminishing returns. Add in problems finding developers skilled in Elixir and Phoenix and the small available libraries. Of course, you also have that to some degree in Rails but it is much less pronounced.

> Add in problems finding developers skilled in Elixir and Phoenix and the small available libraries.

Is this actually a problem you see? I'm going on 15 years in the industry and haven't seen any issues training people up on a new language in just a couple months.

If you need an expert in some library or language to make meaningful business progress I feel like that says more about whatever tool or language you're using, and I simply don't see that with phoenix or elixir in the years I've worked with it.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#38

Post by vinceguidry »

wiseowise wrote: post #28
kloop wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes perfect sense for people that need to scale. But doesn't explain why newer start ups aren't using it. Doing things that don't scale is a proven strategy at the beginning, pg even has a post about it https://www.paulgraham.com/ds.html

No static typing would be a good dealbreaker for us.

Ruby has static type system built into the language.

https://github.com/ruby/rbs

There are others you can use if you like.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#39

Post by kybishop »

demosthanos wrote: post #26
kybishop wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After programming with elixir and phoenix for a few years (with many prior years of rails experience) I have a hard time seeing why one would choose rails. Elixir is more performant, has compiler safety guarantees that are only getting better as types are introduced, is actually designed from the ground up for web dev (being based on the Erlang VM), and... it's just way more fun (subjective I know). Elixir is what I…

> is actually designed from the ground up for web dev (being based on the Erlang VM) Nit: this makes it sounds like the BEAM was designed for web dev, which it was not. Erlang came out of Ericsson and was built for telecoms (OTP stands for Open Telecom Platform), which is where its unique set of trade-offs comes from. Many of those trade-offs make a ton of sense for web but that's not because it was designed for web,…

Very true it is actually designed for telecoms, but like you mentioned the distinction is so small it's not really even a stretch to say it is purpose built with at least the general architecture of web in mind.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#40

Post by kybishop »

sanswork wrote: post #23
kybishop wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After programming with elixir and phoenix for a few years (with many prior years of rails experience) I have a hard time seeing why one would choose rails. Elixir is more performant, has compiler safety guarantees that are only getting better as types are introduced, is actually designed from the ground up for web dev (being based on the Erlang VM), and... it's just way more fun (subjective I know). Elixir is what I…

I switched fully to elixir close to a decade ago now and library availability is still lagging. For pretty much any company I can be pretty sure there will be JS/Ruby/Python/C#/Java integrations/libraries and occasionally you'll find one for elixir maintained by someone that stopped responding to github issues 3 years ago. It's definitely better but I can definitely see why you'd still choose rails these days.

I agree with this sentiment, though in practice it doesn't seem to be much of an issue the vast majority of the time. Sometimes you do need that niche library though, and end up forking and updating for your needs.

Given how rarely this comes up it feels like a tolerable problem that will only diminish as Elixir adoption continues to increase; I am aware of many rail shops that are slowly and quietly switching everything to Elixir, and it feels like that snowball continues to pick up pace as Elixir improves and those libraries are created.

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