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Returning to Rails in 2026

markround.com

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Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#61

Post by wiseowise »

pjmlp wrote: post #33

Going off topic, but the article made me look into "2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey" and as usual there is the big difference between what the "Professional Developers" with and without AI claim to be using, and the usual HN discussions "X is taking over the world, no one uses Y anymore" . As for Rails, I guess now that Ruby is serious about having a JIT in the box, a few actually, it is kind of atractive. Due t…

> As for Rails, I guess now that Ruby is serious about having a JIT in the box, a few actually, it is kind of atractive.

Not until they get their gradual typing story straight.

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#62

Post by mark_round »

louiskottmann wrote: post #35

I've been a Rails DevOps and nowadays a web one-man-show with it for over 10 years and I'd do it again. Not many frameworks have been thriving that long, and there's good reason. It packs everything, is tidy and productive, with a pleasant language to read and write. In the latest Stackoverflow survey, it's back at the "top 5 of desired stacks to use for next project" over a decade after its inception ! Give it a try…

The "one-person framework" thing is a big draw. I'm amazed at how productive I was in it, and it's not just at the code level. Even though I've been doing sysadmin/devops/architect work for over 25 years now, it's just so damn nice now not to have to think about e.g. standing up a HA PostgreSQL cluster or Redis and deployment is largely a solved problem.

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#63

Post by mark_round »

bronlund wrote: post #7

I've never used Rails, but I agree upon "the state of the modern landscape". Instead of looking backwards, I tried to look forward, and what I found was Elixir and the Phoenix framework.

You're about the 5th person now in as many days who has recommended Elixir when I mentioned I was building a project in Ruby. I'll definitely have to check it out for my next project (whatever that may be!)

Can you expand on why you found it so appealing or "holy crap, this is awesome" things I should look at first ?

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#64

Post by wiseowise »

Zanfa wrote: post #6
shafyy wrote: post #2

The main line on the Rails website now reads: > Accelerate your agents with convention over configuration. Ruby on Rails scales from PROMPT to IPO. Token-efficient code that's easy for agents to write and beautiful for humans to review And I fucking hate it. If I read this the first time I would think this is some kind of tool to optimize your LLM agents. I have been using Rails for over a decade now and always liked…

> Accelerate your agents with convention over configuration. Ruby on Rails scales from PROMPT to IPO. Token-efficient code that's easy for agents to write and beautiful for humans to review This is so painful... I can't help but wonder who they're trying to target with such inane slogans. Rails is amazing, but "token-efficiency" is not on the list of reasons why.

> This is so painful... I can't help but wonder who they're trying to target with such inane slogans.

Typical DHH insanity.

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#65

Post by pjmlp »

wiseowise wrote: post #61
pjmlp wrote: post #33

Going off topic, but the article made me look into "2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey" and as usual there is the big difference between what the "Professional Developers" with and without AI claim to be using, and the usual HN discussions "X is taking over the world, no one uses Y anymore" . As for Rails, I guess now that Ruby is serious about having a JIT in the box, a few actually, it is kind of atractive. Due t…

> As for Rails, I guess now that Ruby is serious about having a JIT in the box, a few actually, it is kind of atractive. Not until they get their gradual typing story straight.

Depends on how much one likes the Smalltalk, SELF or Lisp development experience, regarding types.

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#66

Post by IshKebab »

louiskottmann wrote: post #58
f311a wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was talking about total deps, not direct. By installing something like Celery, you get 8-10 extra dependencies that, in turn, can also have extra deps. And yeah, extra deps can conflict with each other as well.

I find the thought daunting but the reality surprisingly easy. You just keep up as you go, as long as you keep things close to the framework it's fine.

> You just keep up as you go

He said "Updating a project that was started 5-6 years ago takes a lot of time."

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#68

Post by bartread »

misiek08 wrote: post #36

Thanks for such public confirming there is a lot of more us. I’m just tired hearing how great ideas will save our overblown pseudo-microservice architecture and I’m also running into some projects during evening that just solve problems without use STOA, unnecessary solutions and architectures. I’m not into RoR, because I was mainly PHP rescuer in the beginning of my career, but they both are just problem solvers. Si…

I've just started using RoR for a live greenfield project since New Year.

Honestly, breath of fresh air.

It's the closest I've come to that old school "in the box" desktop development experience you used to get from building desktop software with Visual Studio or IntelliJ IDEA or NetBeans or Eclipse or any of the other IDEs of the 90s/00s (I never used Delphi or VB but I imagine in some sense they were even moreso than the ones I've listed, which are the ones I used), only it's web development.

For me web development has always felt like a frustrating ordeal of keeping track of 10,000 moving parts that add noise and cognitive load and distract you from fixing the actual problems you're interested in solving. This means the baseline ancillary workload is always frustratingly high. I.e., there's too much yak-shaving.

Whereas Rails seems to drag that all the way down to a level where it feels more similar to the minimal yak-shaving needed to (at least superficially) build, run, and distribute desktop software. Not that this is without its challenges, because every deployment environment is a little different in the desktop world, but the day to day developer experience is much lower friction that modern web development in general.

Also, no sodding TypeScript to deal with. I hate TypeScript: an ugly, verbose, boilerplatey abomination that takes one of the nicest and most fun features of JavaScript (duck typing) and simply bins it off. Awful.

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#69

Post by psychoslave »

misiek08 wrote: post #36

Thanks for such public confirming there is a lot of more us. I’m just tired hearing how great ideas will save our overblown pseudo-microservice architecture and I’m also running into some projects during evening that just solve problems without use STOA, unnecessary solutions and architectures. I’m not into RoR, because I was mainly PHP rescuer in the beginning of my career, but they both are just problem solvers. Si…

What is STOA standing for here, please?

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#70

Post by licorices »

mark_round wrote: post #63
bronlund wrote: post #7

I've never used Rails, but I agree upon "the state of the modern landscape". Instead of looking backwards, I tried to look forward, and what I found was Elixir and the Phoenix framework.

You're about the 5th person now in as many days who has recommended Elixir when I mentioned I was building a project in Ruby. I'll definitely have to check it out for my next project (whatever that may be!) Can you expand on why you found it so appealing or "holy crap, this is awesome" things I should look at first ?

Not the guy, but I used rails at my old job for one and a half year, and used it in some personal projects. I looked into Elixir(and Phoenix) during this time, and Phoenix felt like it was designed for more modern websites, where RoR is built for older and tries to adapt to handle modern ones. It just feels that when you want to do something more responsive in Elixir, it's designed for it, but in Rails, it feels like you're doing something unorthodox or something that is added as an afterthought. Obviously this isn't quite accurate, but it is the vibe I got.

Elixir is also a very cool language in a lot of ways. I wouldn't go all in on Elixir/Phoenix, but that's because there's not a huge demand for it, at least where I reside. I would 100% consider it for some smaller projects though, if I stood between that and Rails, and I wouldn't mind having to get more comfortable with Elixir.

Edit: I haven't used Rails 8, and haven't followed the ecosystem since a bit before, so not sure how this feels nowadays. I *really* enjoy Rails backend though, but the frontend stuff never quite clicked.

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