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…
Elixir is a great language, but it lacks a framework as polished and full-featured as Rails. Phoenix could have been far more popular if it had something like Active Record.
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 spent more of my life that I would like to admit learning and writing Rust. I still build all of my web applications in almost pure Ruby these days. Speed of thought to action is simply unparalleled and it turns out in most situations that was the most important factor.
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…
Elixir is a great language, but it lacks a framework as polished and full-featured as Rails. Phoenix could have been far more popular if it had something like Active Record.
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.
Mobile came on scene, which meant you wanted an API, which split web development into backend and frontend. At the same time, the powerful-but-crusty complexities of enterprise Java backend world, which Rails stood in opposition to, started to get more lightweight and fashionable answers in the Go/Kafka/gRPC/microservices scene. While a very convenient overall development experience, it didn't stack up as well when considered in isolation as either a backend or a frontend technology. Much of the Javascript integration it has today (Turbo, etc) came after people had already moved on.
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.
Can you give an example of where monkey patching made debugging hard? I have a decade of Ruby experience and can't think of a single time it was an issue
This is one of those things that sounds like it'd be a problem but it really isn't
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…
It'd be nice if IEx command history search and recall worked, but it doesn't. ):
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?
As another commenter said,
> it’s about your taste and philosophy.
Personally, method_missing goes against both of mine. It makes programs harder to reason about, more difficult to debug, and nearly impossible to `grep`. That said, I understand that this kind of flexibility is what some people like. I just don’t.
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.
steep and rbs don't work so well and are the wrong approach. sorbet is also the wrong approach but it works better. The Python 2 -> 3 way would've been a better way to do it but Matz chose an unwise way (separate files) that doomed it combined with a failure to type all the things and make it work. Oh, and very few Ruby gems are cryptographically signed and so most code is mostly untrustworthy. Making important things optional makes them unused and essentially worthless.
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 have a very extensive experience with both Ruby on Rails and Elixir/Phoenix. Also ended up building large full-stack apps on either framework. In the beginning when Ruby on Rails said hello to me, I instantly fell in love with it and the simplicity and the natural semantics that flow with it. It was absurdly easy to write new features and ship them to production. As the codebase grew and the team grew we started ru…
I was working with Go a lot as something complementary to Ruby/Rails. I have ended up with so much Ruby work. Either maintenance of large successful efforts from years ago, new development for those same companies, or new development from the people who have experienced great success with Ruby on Rails. I can't seem to get away from it, and that's just fine.
At this point, I putting together teams and getting new developers into Ruby on Rails. I'm also seeing companies move back to full stack RoR after the luster of React has worn off. Also, modern RoR can get you so far now with a fraction of the dual framework headaches of a RoR backend/JS frontend.
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 had a good background in C++ programming before switching to ruby. At first, I was terrified of the lack of strict typing, but after using it for a while, I realized my concern wasn't that warranted. For me it is about the tradeoff of dealing with types vs productivity. Sure I occasionally get bit by a random "method not defined for nil" error, but it is usually very easy to fix, and I don't run into the issue very often. With ruby, and especially rails, it is about the productivity gains. I can simply accomplish much more in less time and fewer lines of code than I would in other languages/frameworks. Not only am I writing fewer lines of code (usually), the language is very expressive without being overly cryptic. The code is more readable, and to me that results in better maintainability. The strong community and ecosystem emphasis that is put on testing, also leads to more resilient and much more maintainable code.