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Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

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Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#91

Post by mrinterweb »

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.

Around that same time, microservice architecture was the new hot. Rails apps tend to be monolithic. Now that many people have realized that microservice architecture is often not worth the complexity costs, monolithic apps are back in fashion, and people are rediscovering how great rails is.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#92

Post by strobe »

Vegenoid wrote: post #49
kybishop wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 u…

I feel like the sentiment of “we can train a competent dev in our language and stack” has given way to “we want a dev with proven experience in our language/stack” over the last few years. I suspect this has something to do with more non-technical staff being put in between candidates and the engineers they’ll be working with during the hiring process. These non-technical staff rely on “x years of experience in thing…

yeah, and sometime it getting really ridicules: N years of experience in language doesn't count if no libraries from approved list was used.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#93

Post by mrinterweb »

nurettin wrote: post #13
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!

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

The rails doesn't scale trope is pretty old at this point and has largely been discredited. Don't believe me, take a look at Shopify or Github.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#94

Post by maximegarcia »

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…

I do. It's a whole thing that get you down to writing your business logic in an expressive way very easily. Framework (Rails) helps, yes, but even pure Ruby can be nice. I've written a second time accuracy simulator for cars and chargers in a EV charging stations in pure Ruby, that was fast to iterate around and pleasant to write.

The ecosystem, toolchain and all do a lot. It is really missed when I do other languages, and I wish to find the same way of developing elsewhere. I currently do C for embedded in an horrible IDE, and I want to bang my head against the table each time I had to click on something on the interface.

(btw Python is a nightmare for me)

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#95

Post by neya »

monooso wrote: post #42
neya wrote: 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.

I never mentioned LiveView in my comment, just Phoenix (you can use Phoenix without LiveView). But, in defense of LiveView, I use it in production - however, you will need something to compliment it for sure - I use Svelte 5, which is great. LV has a learning curve, but it makes development so much better once you get the hang of it, tbh. May need some 2-3 projects to get used to it. My $0.02.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#96

Post by timewizard »

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…

That's not a serious question. Of course people do. Your inability to understand the language does not impact anyone else other than yourself. This should go without saying.

I'm also an expert in C, Go and JavaScript. Ruby is an excellent language and the smalltalk paradigm has some real strengths especially for duck typed systems. The only reason I don't use it more often is because it is slow for the type of work I'm doing recently.

It was amazing for web work and it's fantastic for writing small little utility scripts.

A open distaste for things does not make you sophisticated or smart. You're not in any category of high repute when you do this.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#97

Post by lilsoso »

kybishop wrote: post #37
bhaak wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

> 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.

Some years ago the largest company using Elixir in the US, or at least on the west coast, abandoned Elixir because they couldn't find enough developers.

Yes. The adoption is poor despite the loud voices.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#98

Post by throwawaymaths »

demosthanos wrote: post #54
throwawaymaths wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no. in the modern web world you often have persistent client server connections, which make it a distributed system out the gate. the most inefficient way to deal with this is to go stateless, and without smart architecture to deal with unreliable connection, it's really your best choice (and, it's fine). since BEAM gives you smart disconnection handling, web stuff built in elixir gives you the ability to build on cl…

And if you need that kind of persistent immediately reactive connection and are willing to pay the price, go for it! If that's truly a requirement for you then you're in the subset of web that overlaps substantially with telecoms. I'm not cautioning against making the calculated decision that realtime is a core requirement and choosing the BEAM accordingly. I'm cautioning against positioning the BEAM as being designe…

"willing to pay the price"

what price? learning a new language that is designed to be learned from the one you already know with fewer footguns? ok fine.

but you make it seem like going to elixir is some kind of heavy lift or requires a devops team or something. the lift is low: for example i run a bespoke elixir app in my home on my local network for co2 monitoring.

and for that purpose (maybe 300 lines of code? yes, i do want reactivity. wrangling longpoll for that does not sound fun to me.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#99

Post by pmontra »

burnt-resistor wrote: post #83
poisonta wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ecto

Ecto was literally the component I liked less in all the Phoenix stack when I worked with it after a dozen of years of Rails.

I did maybe 5 years of Phoenix for a customer of mine and went back to Rails for another customer. It's good enough and overall Rails is easier to deploy IMHO. Capistrano vs I don't remember what.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#100

Post by princevegeta89 »

LanceH wrote: post #89
princevegeta89 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dev…

Great to hear. I agree - all the react/SPA bloat along with other layers like Vite/SSR/Webpack etc. is not needed for 95% of the apps today.

Any MVC framework with HTMX, JQuery (yes)/Hotwire/Stimulus/Turbo, etc. puts the productivity and deployment speed of the front-end setup above to extreme shame.

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