Why Meteor will kill Ruby on Rails • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Meteor will kill Ruby on Rails

#191

Post by kamaal » Thu, Oct 31, 2013, 4:08 AM UTC

neya wrote: post #166

This is bullshit. In my whole experience as a full stack developer, after having tried various technologies and languages and frameworks - including ones built with PHP, Ruby, Scala, Javascript and Golang, I can this say with full confidence and can afford to put my name and credibility to stake - Nothing is going to replace Ruby on rails anytime soon. I wish something would, but nothing at the moment, is even close…

I'm a back end developer and don't have much experience with web technologies, so may be some one can enlighten me.

Have we really come to a stage, where what Facebook has done after billions of worth investment and thousands of people working, can be cloned with a open source technology in hours?

>>I can make a clone of any complex app out there in the web in a matter of minutes/hours.

Again how is this possible. Or let me word it this way, if some thing can be copied in minutes how can it be called complex?

Re: Why Meteor will kill Ruby on Rails

#192

Post by e12e » Thu, Oct 31, 2013, 4:12 AM UTC

subsection1h wrote: post #66

Is your blog powered by Meteor? I ask because your blog has some major issues: First, when I load http://differential.io/blog and click a link for an old article, the content of the "Why Meteor will kill Ruby on Rails" article is displayed instead of the content of the article I wanted to read. This happens for every article. Second, when I load http://differential.io/blog , scroll down to an old article, click the a…

I still think blogs shouldn't require javascript. I certainly can't read the article in w3m. And to read it in Firefox I'd have to enable javascript for the domain -- which I occasionally do -- but why should I have to do that to read a bit of text?

I can't read an offline version (reasonably) via wget/curl. I find it doubly ironic considering that the blog actually has a nice clean design -- seemingly focused on content. So why not publish it as content?

As a side note, the text of the article (copy pasted) takes up 7.2k. The main javascript file 591K.

Sorry if this comes off as a bit random anti-javsscript rant, but just because we now have a few apps that benefit from client side logic, doesn't mean that most content on the web does. Surely we can use meteor or whatever to implement (one of) the interfaces to our cms/blog -- and still publish regular content as html+css (maybe with an RSS feed that allows for easy syndication)?

Re: Why Meteor will kill Ruby on Rails

#193

Post by flywheel » Thu, Oct 31, 2013, 4:28 AM UTC

neya wrote: post #166

This is bullshit. In my whole experience as a full stack developer, after having tried various technologies and languages and frameworks - including ones built with PHP, Ruby, Scala, Javascript and Golang, I can this say with full confidence and can afford to put my name and credibility to stake - Nothing is going to replace Ruby on rails anytime soon. I wish something would, but nothing at the moment, is even close…

You're wrong. Node.js has already overtaken what you think Ruby on rails "is". Node.js is the current darling of Silicon Beach. Add on some mongodb and more bells-and-whistles and you have Meteor.

This is probably a more important metric than language popularity on github: http://www.statisticbrain.com/computer-programming-language-... And I'm sure javascript has grown quite a bit in popularity in 2013.

Javascript is getting things done, and with node and mongo and now meteor, it's only getting easier.

It's a fact that many don't want to face, but you may need to practice your JavaScript skills to find your next job.

Re: Why Meteor will kill Ruby on Rails

#194

Post by ryderm » Thu, Oct 31, 2013, 4:29 AM UTC

> We spent over two days recently getting angular.js and rails wired up for a brand new project, that comes out to 12-16 hours spent on configuration instead of writing actual code to build an app that does something the customer wants

Am I the only one who was confused by this? There is no "wiring up" rails and angular js. Just include the source js in your application, or use the google CDN. One line of code.

Re: Why Meteor will kill Ruby on Rails

#195

Post by imslavko » Thu, Oct 31, 2013, 4:29 AM UTC

laughfactory wrote: post #178

As a relative newcomer to web dev, I find Meteor very challenging to work with. It's got too much magic going on. Part of that is the simple fact that the documentation, while sufficient for pros, simply doesn't hold your hand. At all. And beyond the documentation there's a dearth of other resources for finding out how to do things. The community is too small to be effective, and any books which have been written are…

For more "how magic works" a lot of people watch eventedmind.com screencasts. But it's not the case that you can't use any magic without fully understanding it (otherwise we wouldn't be able to use anything in this world).

In my opinion, problem with explaining all the magic - it takes a significant amount of time but the code and underlying system can actually change in several months. I think, it makes more sense once core parts stabilize.

Re: Why Meteor will kill Ruby on Rails

#196

Post by alphakappa » Thu, Oct 31, 2013, 4:32 AM UTC

kamaal wrote: post #191

neya wrote: post #166

This is bullshit. In my whole experience as a full stack developer, after having tried various technologies and languages and frameworks - including ones built with PHP, Ruby, Scala, Javascript and Golang, I can this say with full confidence and can afford to put my name and credibility to stake - Nothing is going to replace Ruby on rails anytime soon. I wish something would, but nothing at the moment, is even close…

I'm a back end developer and don't have much experience with web technologies, so may be some one can enlighten me. Have we really come to a stage, where what Facebook has done after billions of worth investment and thousands of people working, can be cloned with a open source technology in hours? >>I can make a clone of any complex app out there in the web in a matter of minutes/hours. Again how is this possible. Or…

I guess what the parent poster means is that you can create the basic functionality of Facebook easily, i.e. something that looks and feels like Facebook and works reasonably well for a few users.

Whether it can support a billion users is a different story. (It won't)

Re: Why Meteor will kill Ruby on Rails

#197

Post by neya » Thu, Oct 31, 2013, 4:36 AM UTC

1qaz2wsx3edc wrote: post #181

neya wrote: post #166

This is bullshit. In my whole experience as a full stack developer, after having tried various technologies and languages and frameworks - including ones built with PHP, Ruby, Scala, Javascript and Golang, I can this say with full confidence and can afford to put my name and credibility to stake - Nothing is going to replace Ruby on rails anytime soon. I wish something would, but nothing at the moment, is even close…

Sure. No one is taking Rails away from you. I don't think it's bullshit. There are use cases for each. I think Meteor offers up a good debate about "how we do development these days", and attempts to answer them, albeit early. Meteor is still new, and it's path is currently bumpy. But it tries, and innovation is a wonderful thing, that's what Rails gave us early on. The sad thing about Rails is it largely stagnated f…

Thank you for your peaceful tone (unlike the author's). But I think there are a lot of opinions mixed up with your facts:

>The sad thing about Rails is it largely stagnated for some time >You just have to do so much glueing >These are solved problems on node

And to be clear, Node is not a 100% perfect platform either.

>I think the author is attempting to elude to the cargo-cult that hit Rails will migrate to Meteor.

Of all the options available, why Meteor? Like someone on this thread said, it has a lot more evolving to do, to even become on par with rails in the current situation.

We're talking about the basic reason why people choose rails:

Productivity (Getting stuff done) and getting your product out to the market. I think in this perspective nothing beats rails:

    rails new blog
    rails generate scaffold Post title:string text:text
    rails s

How many lines of actual code I have written so far to actually get my basic blog idea up and running? None.

Re: Why Meteor will kill Ruby on Rails

#198

Post by neya » Thu, Oct 31, 2013, 4:38 AM UTC

alphakappa wrote: post #196

kamaal wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a back end developer and don't have much experience with web technologies, so may be some one can enlighten me. Have we really come to a stage, where what Facebook has done after billions of worth investment and thousands of people working, can be cloned with a open source technology in hours? >>I can make a clone of any complex app out there in the web in a matter of minutes/hours. Again how is this possible. Or…

I guess what the parent poster means is that you can create the basic functionality of Facebook easily, i.e. something that looks and feels like Facebook and works reasonably well for a few users. Whether it can support a billion users is a different story. (It won't)

Thank you. That's exactly what I meant.

Re: Why Meteor will kill Ruby on Rails

#199

Post by neya » Thu, Oct 31, 2013, 4:44 AM UTC

kamaal wrote: post #191

neya wrote: post #166

This is bullshit. In my whole experience as a full stack developer, after having tried various technologies and languages and frameworks - including ones built with PHP, Ruby, Scala, Javascript and Golang, I can this say with full confidence and can afford to put my name and credibility to stake - Nothing is going to replace Ruby on rails anytime soon. I wish something would, but nothing at the moment, is even close…

I'm a back end developer and don't have much experience with web technologies, so may be some one can enlighten me. Have we really come to a stage, where what Facebook has done after billions of worth investment and thousands of people working, can be cloned with a open source technology in hours? >>I can make a clone of any complex app out there in the web in a matter of minutes/hours. Again how is this possible. Or…

Still didn't get my point did you?

I meant that you can get out an MVP of a complex web application like Facebook in a matter of hours/days (depending on the complexity of course) instead of having to wait for weeks/months when you're on with another framework.

>if some thing can be copied in minutes how can it be called complex?

Just because your life is made easier by a tool, doesn't necessarily mean the original process is any less complex. And that's why the market for for such tools even exist :)

Translation: Just because a bottle of Coca Cola costs $0.99 and a bottle of water costs $2, doesn't mean that the process of creating Coca cola is by any means less complex.

Cheers.

Re: Why Meteor will kill Ruby on Rails

#200

Post by yelnatz » Thu, Oct 31, 2013, 4:48 AM UTC

kamaal wrote: post #191

neya wrote: post #166

This is bullshit. In my whole experience as a full stack developer, after having tried various technologies and languages and frameworks - including ones built with PHP, Ruby, Scala, Javascript and Golang, I can this say with full confidence and can afford to put my name and credibility to stake - Nothing is going to replace Ruby on rails anytime soon. I wish something would, but nothing at the moment, is even close…

I'm a back end developer and don't have much experience with web technologies, so may be some one can enlighten me. Have we really come to a stage, where what Facebook has done after billions of worth investment and thousands of people working, can be cloned with a open source technology in hours? >>I can make a clone of any complex app out there in the web in a matter of minutes/hours. Again how is this possible. Or…

I'm a beginner web developer and I can clone facebook in a few hours.

In its core, the app is just users who can friend each other.

Add AJAX to that... and tada, something that resembles facebook.

Scaling the app to be very reactive, available to millions accessing it at the same time, and with near 100% up time is where the hundreds millions of dollars go. (and all that data mining)