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Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

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Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#71

Post by Spivak »

vinceguidry wrote: post #36
camcil wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Well and that JS is really fast thanks to V8 and TS has leapfrogged Ruby in terms of developer tooling. Personally I think Ruby is a nicer language and JS has a lot of odd quirks but it became Java. A good natural choice that can be used for any project.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#72

Post by rubyfan »

Hnus wrote: post #58
PapaPalpatine wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an odd question lol. Yes, people like writing in Ruby. I’m one of the. Switched from C# in 2016.

You don't miss things like enums, exhaustive switch or any other basic language features? How about `method_missing` its such a crazy idea to me that something like this exists, I know why it exists but I am like why, why such bloat and complexity.

Can you elaborate on why you think method_missing is bloat?

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#73

Post by throw-the-towel »

pdimitar wrote: post #69
ksec wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pa…

What's unprofessional about liking one syntax more than another? Of course this shouldn't be the main reason to adopt a language, but having a preference is totally OK.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#74

Post by rubyfan »

Hnus wrote: post #55
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!

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…

Yes, many people love programming in Ruby. It’s a matter of preference not some lack of technical merit. There are plenty of people who are well equipped in strongly typed languages that write in both. You might not know them but you really don’t have to look very far.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#75

Post by pdimitar »

throw-the-towel wrote: post #73
pdimitar wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pa…

What's unprofessional about liking one syntax more than another? Of course this shouldn't be the main reason to adopt a language, but having a preference is totally OK.

Look in this sub-thread. One person claimed that is the main reason for them choosing Ruby over Elixir.

I simply cannot respect that.

Having a preference though? Yeah, absolutely fine. We all do.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#76

Post by kubectl_h »

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.

* Node bringing JS to the backend.

* Python won in data science/analytics and AI/machine learning

* Python also seems to be the high level language used most in academia for non CS engineering (and CS too)

Rails continues to be relatively popular in early stage companies. Plenty of well known companies started with Rails in the last 10+ years and it continues on as part of their stack.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#77

Post by quest88 »

helloguillecl wrote: post #68
Hnus wrote: 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…

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.

I agree. I think..there's too much freedom. Too many ways to do things, and debugging is hard with monkey patching.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#78

Post by tuyenhx »

Hnus wrote: post #55
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!

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…

Yes. I do. I enjoy ruby so much.

After 10 years working with Java. Now I dont wanna go back anymore.

It is about your taste and philosophy. I dont think it related skill issue.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#79

Post by azuanrb »

runjake wrote: post #45
mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #44

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”.

Similar experience. Although, recently just tried Claude Code and it seems to be a pretty good upgrade (both Sonnet and Opus). I'd suggest you to give it a try if you haven't. For UI, Playwright MCP helps a lot. And since it can run rspec too, it can get faster feedback.

To me it is better now, but not as good as certain languages. Since that I'm using Go as well, I do notice Claude Code perform better with Go.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#80

Post by timr »

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.

> 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

New things are "simple", and old things are inevitably complex, which always attracts the new generation of inexperienced coders (I include myself in this). This continues until all of the complexity of the domain are captured in the "new" thing, and the cycle begins again. Rails is vastly more sophisticated than when I started using it in ~2007, when things like CSRF attack mitigation weren't even built in. So it's a better framework now, but you have to understand a lot more to get started.

Also, from ~2012 until recently, bootcamps have been pumping out new programmers who only know Javascript because it was possible to do a full-stack web app with JS, and the bootcamps would rather not teach another language.

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