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Existential crisis at Railsconf

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Re: Existential crisis at Railsconf

#51

Post by AlwaysBCoding »

hopeless wrote: post #6

LOL at the idea that every Rails programmer will be switching to Clojure or Elixir! While they might be interesting languages (particularly Elixir) I don't see any 10x advantages their web stacks have over Rails for the typical "majestic monolith" use case. Re. EventMachine: As I understood DHH's speech, the idea is that ActionCable abstracts all the messiness around EventMachine, Websockets, Rack and threads. We won…

Having used both Rails + Clojure here's my take.

As a general comparison, when it comes to building server-side web apps Rails is preferable to Clojure. But for the web stacks / ecosystems as a whole Clojure wins by about 10x. The main reason for this is ClojureScript. For those who aren't familiar ClojureScript is a Clojure->Javascript compiler that lets you write your UI code in Clojure and drastically simplifies Javascript codebases. Given how much time is consumed writing UI code in modern web app development, the benefits that ClojureScript gives you over the turbolinks/js framework of your choice approach that Rails emphasizes cannot be overstated.

I've found that writing web-apps/api's in Clojure, using ClojureScript on the front-end, then using Rails to write small services where you want to take advantage of some of the great Ruby libraries is the way to go. You get the best of both worlds.

Re: Existential crisis at Railsconf

#52

Post by mpdehaan2 »

biokoda wrote: post #28
federico3 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minus the security issues.

And equally bad at concurrency.

I don't buy this, having written and dealt with a lot of concurrent Django apps - I think people read something about the GIL often, and don't understand what the articles are really meaning.

Basically Django is usually fronted with mod_wsgi and you use celery for backend tasks. The multiple requests part are dealt with because the web server pre-forks, and it's just fine with it.

I think Django's problem is it moves very slowly, and mostly just that. The ORM isn't awesome, but it's workable. You can also choose to not use parts of it, like templates, and that's common in single-page apps.

Re: Existential crisis at Railsconf

#53

Post by makeitsuckless »

t4nkd wrote: post #36

Is this just a really polite, introspective take on (Rails|Ruby) is a Ghetto? I can't point out one really valid critique in this entire rant. While I imagine that you've had enough kool-aid to actually believe the things you said, I think you should probably do a few google searches to find out how many shops are hiring Rails devs versus Clojure or Elixir. You can do more experimenting by seeing who else is actually…

> Startups and other more established companies still choose Rails as their platform

As far as I can tell, this process has come to a grinding halt in the past few years.

I certainly see established companies ditching Ruby, not so much because of the language or framework itself, but because of the community that only seems to be able to solve problems "the Rails way", even if that's far from the most appropriate architectural solution.

It's shocking how many Ruby developers are architecturally ignorant about anything not applied by Rails, and it's biting many companies in the ass.

Re: Existential crisis at Railsconf

#54

Post by juliangregorian »

hopeless wrote: post #6

LOL at the idea that every Rails programmer will be switching to Clojure or Elixir! While they might be interesting languages (particularly Elixir) I don't see any 10x advantages their web stacks have over Rails for the typical "majestic monolith" use case. Re. EventMachine: As I understood DHH's speech, the idea is that ActionCable abstracts all the messiness around EventMachine, Websockets, Rack and threads. We won…

Rails programmer switching to Clojure/Elixir here. And my workplace is switching to Scala.

Re: Existential crisis at Railsconf

#55

Post by kyllo »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #44
erichmond wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just an anecdote as: - I agree that most rails programmers will not move to clojure. - For monorail apps, rails is still king. That said, for us, when comparing clojure and ruby REST API services we've built, clojure has had the following benefits: - Less code - Less tests needed - Better concurrency - Less developer hours - Less maintenance - About 33% of the servers for same performance - Easier/faster debu…

Interestingly, we had a couple of Clojure experiments. Takeaway was that there were some benefits in terms of performance and maintenance, but they weren't worth the tradeoff in expressivity and increased developer time. There's no reason that Rails should be restricted to 'monorail' or monolithic apps. We've had great success writing what are essentially microservices in Rails. Code is easy to read, easy to maintain…

If you feel Clojure is less expressive than Ruby, you're not good enough at Clojure yet. I'm not saying you have to prefer Clojure's syntax, and Ruby probably has more libraries for a lot of things you want to do. Going from Ruby to Clojure may be a productivity tradeoff for you and your team, but objectively it's not an expressivity tradeoff. Clojure has a bit more expressive power than Ruby.

Re: Existential crisis at Railsconf

#56

Post by LunaSea »

stephenson wrote: post #8
noelwelsh wrote: post #5

In web framework terms, Rails is old. When it was created single-page applications weren't on anyone's radar, APIs were extremely uncommon, and websockets hadn't been invented. It's natural to expect some pain try to adapt new paradigms into the old model. Whether this pain is worth it is up to the individual to decide. My web applications are almost always pure client-side these days, so Rails is not something I oft…

Re "In web framework terms, Rails is old" Oh how I love that! I would rather build my business on something old and well testet then something new and shiny.

http://www.cvedetails.com/vendor/12043/Rubyonrails.html

"well tested"

Re: Existential crisis at Railsconf

#57

Post by davidann »

kyllo wrote: post #55
matthewmacleod wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, we had a couple of Clojure experiments. Takeaway was that there were some benefits in terms of performance and maintenance, but they weren't worth the tradeoff in expressivity and increased developer time. There's no reason that Rails should be restricted to 'monorail' or monolithic apps. We've had great success writing what are essentially microservices in Rails. Code is easy to read, easy to maintain…

If you feel Clojure is less expressive than Ruby, you're not good enough at Clojure yet. I'm not saying you have to prefer Clojure's syntax, and Ruby probably has more libraries for a lot of things you want to do. Going from Ruby to Clojure may be a productivity tradeoff for you and your team, but objectively it's not an expressivity tradeoff. Clojure has a bit more expressive power than Ruby.

Could you reference examples of this assertion please?

Re: Existential crisis at Railsconf

#58

Post by dankohn1 »

My last startup used Node.js + Angular + Postgres, which was great for supporting multiple single page applications and websockets.

With my current startup (a healthcare marketplace where we have to support older browsers), we chose Rails as the best and most mature way to provide server-rendered pages.

I think it's great to try to extend Rails to provide a credible websockets approach, but it will always be difficult because the biggest strength of Rails is the incredible ecosystem of gems. However, all of that existing code is written as blocking, rather than asynchronously like Node and some newer frameworks.

Nevertheless, the Rails ecosystem remains a hotbed of innovation as well as a very warm and welcoming place for both new and experienced programmers.

Rails has not been the new hotness since at least the time Node rolled around. But that's a long way from an existential crisis.

Re: Existential crisis at Railsconf

#59

Post by monsterix »

makeitsuckless wrote: post #53
t4nkd wrote: post #36

Is this just a really polite, introspective take on (Rails|Ruby) is a Ghetto? I can't point out one really valid critique in this entire rant. While I imagine that you've had enough kool-aid to actually believe the things you said, I think you should probably do a few google searches to find out how many shops are hiring Rails devs versus Clojure or Elixir. You can do more experimenting by seeing who else is actually…

> Startups and other more established companies still choose Rails as their platform As far as I can tell, this process has come to a grinding halt in the past few years. I certainly see established companies ditching Ruby, not so much because of the language or framework itself, but because of the community that only seems to be able to solve problems "the Rails way", even if that's far from the most appropriate arc…

> this process has come to a grinding halt in the past few years.

No it has not. In fact there has been more elaborate work done inside of rails (and django/python) than ever before.

Actually 'Rails is dying' rant has been going on for years! Almost like cold war propaganda. The only thing that will cease to exist is the war.

Re: Existential crisis at Railsconf

#60

Post by monsterix »

kailuowang wrote: post #42
t4nkd wrote: post #36

Is this just a really polite, introspective take on (Rails|Ruby) is a Ghetto? I can't point out one really valid critique in this entire rant. While I imagine that you've had enough kool-aid to actually believe the things you said, I think you should probably do a few google searches to find out how many shops are hiring Rails devs versus Clojure or Elixir. You can do more experimenting by seeing who else is actually…

> the alternatives are The main competitive alternatives to Rails are single page application frontend frameworks combined with light API focused backend frameworks. Not a single web application framework.

So far from what I've seen is that most frontend frameworks go inside one of the directories inside rails. Nice, clean and tight integration. :)
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