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Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

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Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#111

Post by vidarh »

ksec wrote: post #70
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.

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 c…

When Twitter was using Rails it was also using a totally broken architecture that was way too centralised. Their replatforming also involved rearchitecting.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#112

Post by zem »

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 have used a lot of languages, both static and dynamic, and ruby is one of the ones I love. maintaining large code bases is certainly not its forte, but in terms of expressing what you want in code it is like a tool that fits really well into my hand.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#113

Post by vidarh »

IshKebab wrote: post #106
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!

Can you tell me why exactly? I've never used Rails but I have tried to understand and modify Gitlab's Ruby code and honestly it was a completely incomprehensible mess. I'm no stranger to large codebases but Gitlab is almost impossible to follow and it seems to be entirely because they use Ruby. I mean if you look at one file the code seems fairly clean and well written, but if you try and figure out e.g. where a func…

Learn to use a remote debugger, and how to show the method source location.

This may sound snarky, but it's a good faith suggestion. Ruby has all of the tools to make debugging easy, but they're different than what you will expect if you come expecting things to work like in the static typing world.

But as much as I love Ruby, I do agree that Rails has too much unnecessary "magic". Much of which more modern Ruby is a reaction to. Personally I avoid Rails for my Ruby web projects.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#114

Post by vidarh »

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.

Twitter also would've scaled a lot further on Rails just by dismantling the monolith. I don'tike Rails (though I love Ruby), but the way Rails was scapegoated for an original architecture that was not suited for scale irrespective of framework or language was annoying.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#115

Post by monooso »

neya wrote: post #95
monooso wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

FWIW, I've been using LV in production for five years. My comment stands.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#116

Post by the_fury »

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…

Absolutely. I enjoy it so much that I wonder "do people actually NOT enjoy writing Ruby?" It's usually the first tool I pull out of the toolbox for DSLs, scripts, spikes, one-offs and the like. A lot of the time, the project will happily stay in Ruby unless there's a good reason to use something else. And then I move it - horses for courses.

I programmed professionally in C, C++, C#, Deplhi, and a few other languages well before I had even heard of Ruby.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#117

Post by IshKebab »

vidarh wrote: post #113
IshKebab wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell me why exactly? I've never used Rails but I have tried to understand and modify Gitlab's Ruby code and honestly it was a completely incomprehensible mess. I'm no stranger to large codebases but Gitlab is almost impossible to follow and it seems to be entirely because they use Ruby. I mean if you look at one file the code seems fairly clean and well written, but if you try and figure out e.g. where a func…

Learn to use a remote debugger, and how to show the method source location. This may sound snarky, but it's a good faith suggestion. Ruby has all of the tools to make debugging easy, but they're different than what you will expect if you come expecting things to work like in the static typing world. But as much as I love Ruby, I do agree that Rails has too much unnecessary "magic". Much of which more modern Ruby is a…

I mean... that sounds like a pretty horrible dev experience. Every time I want to understand a piece of code I have to actually run it? Insane.

For example I'm trying to understand Gitlab's merge train behaviour. Do I have to set up an entire Gitlab instance from source, then create a project, set up CI, run a merge train, all while running Gitlab in a debugger and then set a breakpoint and then finally I can see where the code is called from?

I've also done a lot of work on VSCode which is similarly large but mercifully written in Typescript. For that I just right-click->find all references. It takes 3 seconds.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#118

Post by ukprogrammer »

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”.

I've found that OpenAI models write fantastic Rails code, having a deep understanding of Rails codebase conventions. Anthropic's models do seem to have a very hard time writing Ruby in general.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#119

Post by bhaak »

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…

The Ruby on Rails project I'm currently involved in doesn't struggle with training people, but rather with retaining them. There have been a few instances where we trained a junior developer and got them up to speed, only to lose them within a year. For small teams, this can be quite frustrating and disheartening.

This issue might be partly due to the project being in a somewhat niche and conservative industry, so there are no startup vibes. However, since they started looking for someone ready to make a longer commitment than a developer who has just started their career, things have improved. But this approach also limits the pool of available developers.

It's worth noting that we also use Elixir in this project (the chief architect is quite fanboyish about it), but we have never had any new developers come in with pre-existing knowledge of Elixir.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#120

Post by ukprogrammer »

vidarh wrote: post #110
quest88 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If debugging is hard to you in Ruby because of monkey patching, it's an issue of not knowing the debugging tools. Attach pry or Ruby debug, and show the source location of a method, or log them. This isn't surprising - debugging Ruby is different to debugging most static languages, and more tutorials on how to do this well would be nice... Also the use of monkey patching in Ruby peaked something like a decade and hal…

Agreed, it still absolutely astounds me the number of developers out there that do not use a debugger as an essential part of their toolkit.
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