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Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

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Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#61
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: do people actually enjoy writing Ruby? I feel I’m writing in something like Bash. I never felt this way until I picked up other languages like Rust, Zig, C#, and learned a tiny bit of programming language theory. After that, the loose and squishy feel of Ruby really started to bug me. Also, it seems like every Ruby programmer I know only ever uses other dynamic languages like Python. It’s never like…

> Also, it seems like every Ruby programmer I know only ever uses other dynamic languages like Python. It’s never like they’re experts in C++ or something and then decided to start programming in Ruby. Can you expand on what you’re saying here or why you’re raising this is as an issue with ruby the language or rails the library?

Just a personal observation that made my communication with ruby developers hard as I cannot use concepts from strongly typed languages because they live in a word without them, but I guess it's more issue with me than them.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#62
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With so many generative AI tools out there, picking more obscure or niche languages is a detractor because the AI models won't have as much depth of training to pull from when you ask it to do things. Also, technology choices for B2B web apps is rarely going to be a sole factor in determining success or failure of any business. As much as this community likes to compare performance metrics, benchmarks, frameworks and…

I do some Rails work and I’ve found that Ruby and Rails are one of generative AIs weaker languages. I usually get pretty shoddy output[1]. I generally don’t use AI during Rails stuff, other than as a hint for a Google search or a docs lookup. Are you having a different experience? 1. Shoddy output with Ruby and Rails knowledge. In general, I would consider myself pretty advanced with “prompt engineering”.

I'm not expecting perfect output, if there is such a thing. I'm expecting output equivalent to a junior engineer or intern at this point in time. I can tell an agent in the editor I want it to add a many to many join relationship and a multi select field to a form and it does it pretty decently. In some ways this is more automating the tedious tasks which is really what AI's strong suit is right now, in my opinion. Sure I could go move a method around, refactor the 5 classes that call it, etc. but I can delegate that task and its done in a few seconds while I think about the next thing I want to do.

I find if you get too lengthy with tasks or too advanced AI goes off the rails so to speak, sorry for the pun.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#63

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…

Benchmarks of Phoenix vs Rails. https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r23&f=z... Ranging from 1.5-3.5x faster.

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r23&l=z...

I thought to include other implementation from Ruby and Elixir. Rails has always been doing much more and on the heavier side of things. There are also many test that simply by switching server to iodine brings the performance to Elixir / Phoenix level.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#64
post #42
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a Rails consultant for about 7 years. Then, I switched to Phoenix - really out of just curiosity. Since then, I've never looked back. If you never believed in "Simple is better" philosophy, you will after using Phoenix. The development time is shorter, the bugs are far less since you catch them at compile time and the development experience is unmatched. Oh, and did I mention performance? You can get insane per…

I wouldn't describe LiveView as simple, necessarily. It makes for a great demo, but in my experience it complicates simple things in lots of subtle—and occasionally pernicious—ways. Whilst you can use Phoenix without LiveView, this is becoming increasingly difficult as the Phoenix developers have clearly decided that LiveView is The Way.

+1 from me. I already spend more time learning phoenix in my free time than I'd like to admit and I'm stil waiting for the moment it makes 'click'.

It's just so hard sometimes to wrap your head around the abstractions, even though they are shallow + things are changing fast. I feel like my django-ish mental modal of web applications is also getting in the way a lot.

It would probably help, if I could spend more time with less interruptions on it. But I have to say that I expected to get into it a lot quicker since it's praised so much for it's dev experience.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unusable mess.

Ruby should take lessons from Python and TS on how to make proper gradual typing.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#66
post #29

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.

Since the last 12-15 months, every Elixir job posted gets literal hundreds of applications. Just saying.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#68
post #55

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

Serious question: do people actually enjoy writing Ruby? I feel I’m writing in something like Bash. I never felt this way until I picked up other languages like Rust, Zig, C#, and learned a tiny bit of programming language theory. After that, the loose and squishy feel of Ruby really started to bug me. Also, it seems like every Ruby programmer I know only ever uses other dynamic languages like Python. It’s never like…

I love Rails, its been my to-go framework for reference. But I could never get as confortable with Ruby as writing JS or PHP. I do not know the reason.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#69
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Benchmarks of Phoenix vs Rails. https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r23&f=z... Ranging from 1.5-3.5x faster.

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r23&l=z... I thought to include other implementation from Ruby and Elixir. Rails has always been doing much more and on the heavier side of things. There are also many test that simply by switching server to iodine brings the performance to Elixir / Phoenix level.

These benchmarks will be forever amusing. I've done two full migrations of a Rails app to Phoenix and the differences we've seen in our telemetry boards ranged anywhere from 4.5x all the way to 20x.

IMO TechEmpower lost all credibility long time ago after it was demonstrated they do nothing against heavily gamed benchmarks where people literally do basic string matching against regexes instead of doing proper HTTP parsing. Some even relied on characters being at exact positions.

Add to this how slow they were to adopt normal production application code changes to Elixir apps where it was proven that the author of the benchmark had no idea how to code an Elixir/Phoenix app and yeah, it does not look good for TechEmpower.

All that being said, use what you like (some even expressed the confusing stance of "I like Ruby's syntax more" which, need I even comment how unprofessional that is?). But to claim Elixir is just some mere 2x times faster than Ruby is misguided. My real production experience from the last 10 years says this is bull.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#70
post #32

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.

Performance, scalability or ultimately cost. Remember 10 - 15 years ago when Twitter was using Ruby it was a lot slower. Even without YJIT CRuby today would still be 2 - 3x faster than then. Tooling wasn't as good, Hardware were a lot more expensive at the time. So when you have news spread out about how RoR cant scale cheaply, they jump to newer and shinier things like Node.

I would guess running RoR today is 100x cheaper than 10 years before. And will continue to improve as we get ZJIT or running on top of JRuby.

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