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How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails

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Re: How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails

#11

Post by muglug »

jamesfinlayson wrote: post #8
rdhgfdgrdhgfdg wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it demised? Shopify, Stripe and many new YC startups use it.

I think it's easy to say it's declining based on things like Red Monk's ranking, but with GitHub, Stripe and Shopify behind it, it's not going anywhere soon. And apparently Rails us is slowly increasing: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/php-maintains-an-eno...

Yeah, three companies worth an estimated $300B can keep any language alive. It’s fascinating to track the second wind of out-of-fashion languages, held aloft by a few mature companies that depend on it.

Re: How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails

#12

Post by sho »

jamesfinlayson wrote: post #8
rdhgfdgrdhgfdg wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it demised? Shopify, Stripe and many new YC startups use it.

I think it's easy to say it's declining based on things like Red Monk's ranking, but with GitHub, Stripe and Shopify behind it, it's not going anywhere soon. And apparently Rails us is slowly increasing: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/php-maintains-an-eno...

Isn't that graph hopelessly tainted by eg. the dominance of WordPress? I mean, yes that's PHP, but just because 80% of sites are running it doesn't mean 80% of development is in PHP. Far from it.

Re: How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails

#13

Post by gamechangr »

gscho wrote: post #2

This is a bit off topic but I wanted to say I’m really glad there are still people out there hacking on some ruby + Postgres projects and writing about it. I feel that ruby is an excellent language and dread the demise of it.

Ruby is still an amazing language

Rails needs some help

Re: How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails

#14

Post by stephenhuey »

wpietri wrote: post #10
ipaddr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly doubt that you will reach the scaling limits of rails unless you have a massive product and even if you do Python would not be a good replacement.

Depends on the product. The Rails architecture is fine for CRUD apps, and Heroku will happily take more and more money for more and more database capacity. As long as your ARPU is solid, you're fine scaling like that. But there are more things in the world than CRUD apps. I'm building tools to track hate on social media, and there's a lot of social media out there. Rails, or any RDBMS-centered architecture, won't cut…

For implementing ye olde business logic, which is far more common in software development than cool tech such as ML that is discussed a disproportionally high amount compared to its real-world usage, Ruby on Rails wins. Sure, there are lots of frameworks that are good for shipping business features quickly, but Ruby on Rails is still among the leaders of that group due to concise code, magical defaults that give you a boost, an excellent ORM, view helpers for sooooo many common scenarios and edge cases that the JS world is still playing catch-up to, etc. And a lot of the new defaults in Rails 7 are aimed at reducing complexity and rescuing developers from the insanity of front-end development.

Great for CRUD, yes, but plenty more than that. Soooooo many apps don’t need to wrestle with a huge amount of data or even a data warehouse or analytics or a data lake or any data science or anything requiring even a blazing fast query time on a super complex gnarly data model, and most of those would ship faster by using Rails, and be easier to maintain as well.

But the devs don’t tell management that……

Re: How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails

#15

Post by swader999 »

wpietri wrote: post #10
ipaddr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly doubt that you will reach the scaling limits of rails unless you have a massive product and even if you do Python would not be a good replacement.

Depends on the product. The Rails architecture is fine for CRUD apps, and Heroku will happily take more and more money for more and more database capacity. As long as your ARPU is solid, you're fine scaling like that. But there are more things in the world than CRUD apps. I'm building tools to track hate on social media, and there's a lot of social media out there. Rails, or any RDBMS-centered architecture, won't cut…

You still have the GIL in python to overcome.

Re: How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails

#16

Post by meremortals »

gamechangr wrote: post #13
gscho wrote: post #2

This is a bit off topic but I wanted to say I’m really glad there are still people out there hacking on some ruby + Postgres projects and writing about it. I feel that ruby is an excellent language and dread the demise of it.

Ruby is still an amazing language Rails needs some help

What would you change about Rails?

Re: How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails

#17

Post by joelbluminator »

muglug wrote: post #11
jamesfinlayson wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's easy to say it's declining based on things like Red Monk's ranking, but with GitHub, Stripe and Shopify behind it, it's not going anywhere soon. And apparently Rails us is slowly increasing: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/php-maintains-an-eno...

Yeah, three companies worth an estimated $300B can keep any language alive. It’s fascinating to track the second wind of out-of-fashion languages, held aloft by a few mature companies that depend on it.

I'd argue even without them Ruby would be alive in the sense that the core language would get frequent updates. Even Perl is still alive https://github.com/Perl/perl5, even in a healthier state than I would have thought.

Re: How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails

#18

Post by Mikeb85 »

gamechangr wrote: post #13
gscho wrote: post #2

This is a bit off topic but I wanted to say I’m really glad there are still people out there hacking on some ruby + Postgres projects and writing about it. I feel that ruby is an excellent language and dread the demise of it.

Ruby is still an amazing language Rails needs some help

How so? Plenty of large companies still use Rails. Plenty of startups still use it. I remember when SPAs were all the rage, now every JS framework is doing SSR, just like Rails did/does. What full-stack framework is as complete *and* allows for the same speed of development?

Re: How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails

#19

Post by joelbluminator »

wpietri wrote: post #10
ipaddr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly doubt that you will reach the scaling limits of rails unless you have a massive product and even if you do Python would not be a good replacement.

Depends on the product. The Rails architecture is fine for CRUD apps, and Heroku will happily take more and more money for more and more database capacity. As long as your ARPU is solid, you're fine scaling like that. But there are more things in the world than CRUD apps. I'm building tools to track hate on social media, and there's a lot of social media out there. Rails, or any RDBMS-centered architecture, won't cut…

If you will grow big enough surely you will need some kind of web presence - then you can introduce Rails :) Or don't. Honestly having the team on one language makes a lot of sense.

Re: How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails

#20

Post by moksly »

gscho wrote: post #2

This is a bit off topic but I wanted to say I’m really glad there are still people out there hacking on some ruby + Postgres projects and writing about it. I feel that ruby is an excellent language and dread the demise of it.

Some of the most interesting projects I stumble on as part of the public sector digitalisation in EU are made in Ruby on Rails (Southern Europe, especially Spain/Portugal), PHP (all of EU) and Python (Eastern Europe).

Having recently switched most of our internal development from C# to Python and Powershell I get it. I can’t imagine not building small web apps in Python and I imagine PHP and RnR are exactly the same experience of getting things to simply work extremely fast.

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