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Existential crisis at Railsconf

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Re: Existential crisis at Railsconf

#121

Post by angersock »

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…

Elixir/Erlang/OTP has a lot of useful stuff to say about testing, deployment, reliability, maintenance, and code quality. Ruby does too, but is constrained in various ways.

Honestly, websockets-as-first-class-citizen plus the E/E/O process model is a huge win, and one that Rails just won't have going for it.

That doesn't make Rails obsolete, but it's outside of its comfort zone compared to the new/old tech.

Re: Existential crisis at Railsconf

#122

Post by cies »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #67
cies wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the idea that every Rails programmer will be switching to Clojure or Elixir! [...] I don't see any 10x advantages [...] I do. While I cannot speak for Clojure and Elixir, I can speak for Haskell, which I have moved to from Rails. 10x for me is: 1. A 70MB all-in binary to deploy, using 1-3MB of memory when running (has a build in HTTP(S) server), responding in 2-10ms to my requests. Compare that to 700-1500MB of gem…

I'm not sure that reduction in code size or better performance is necessarily the 10x metric you want to go for. Maybe in some cases, of course, but 'my framework has fewer lines of code' is absolutely irrelevant to the delivered value of a service, for example. Does using Yesod mean that you can deliver code that better meets your goals? In a business environment, that might mean easier maintenance, or better perfor…

Often goals are: crank out X with programmers Y on deadline Z. I assume the client has no language/framework preference.

If X is a greenfield webapp and Y are not Haskellists yet (language has a steeper learning curve then, for instance, Ruby), and Z is very soon then I will probably choose Rails (given that programmers have some experience with dynamic languages and/MVC framework, and I'm fluent with Rails).

Notice that maintenance costs are not a factor. This is often not accounted for, but a large part of a webapp's costs are maintenance: and this is where Haskell shines: maintenance and refactoring.

Let's say I'm starting up, then low maintenance costs are of PRIME importance. You want to be able to keep adding/improving with a small team, not being bogged down by an endless stream of bugs only found on production -- nothing ruins flow like that.

Re: Existential crisis at Railsconf

#123

Post by stephenson »

mgkimsal wrote: post #32
stephenson wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

would you move to java? that's older and even less shiny.

I would, if the technology solved the problem, the workflow fitted our org, the cost of running it in production fitted our budget etc.

Re: Existential crisis at Railsconf

#124

Post by cies »

thothamon wrote: post #114
cies wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the idea that every Rails programmer will be switching to Clojure or Elixir! [...] I don't see any 10x advantages [...] I do. While I cannot speak for Clojure and Elixir, I can speak for Haskell, which I have moved to from Rails. 10x for me is: 1. A 70MB all-in binary to deploy, using 1-3MB of memory when running (has a build in HTTP(S) server), responding in 2-10ms to my requests. Compare that to 700-1500MB of gem…

As a Haskell programmer who has also come from Rails -- I'm a Rails developer now -- and who is also interested in writing a web app in Haskell, I'm very interested in your experiences. Are you on any forums or online communities that have helped you in developing a Haskell web app?

No, just started to use Yesod to do simple things. Then moved on to hard things. Sure I'm on relevant mailinglists and /r/haskell; but apart form that no special community forum helped me.

Re: Existential crisis at Railsconf

#125

Post by lifo »

moe wrote: post #97
lifo wrote: post #77

As someone who's done the bulk of the work for Action Cable, I wanted to clear the confusion re: cable and eventmachine. Cable is currently using EventMachine because it uses faye-websocket for dealing with websockets. And Faye is one of the very few well maintained ruby library dealing with websockets. And in fact, Action Cable uses Celluloid threadpool to run all the application code in threads. So the model is a c…

As someone who's tried to use Faye and EventMachine (separately) back in the Ruby 1.9.3 days: Have they stabilized enough to be used for anything? My memory of them is rather horrible. Memory leaks, segmentation faults(!) and obscure deadlocks eventually made me scratch EventMachine from the list of things I'd ever want to touch again. And Faye, well, I don't think I even got it fully running at the time. I still re-…

You can't use Faye without eventmachine. Cable only uses faye-websocket though - https://github.com/faye/faye-websocket-ruby . Do let me know if you had any negative experiences with that. I don't know about the state of the things in the 1.9.3 days, but faye-websocket has always "just worked" for me.

Re: Existential crisis at Railsconf

#126

Post by cies »

thothamon wrote: post #114
cies wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the idea that every Rails programmer will be switching to Clojure or Elixir! [...] I don't see any 10x advantages [...] I do. While I cannot speak for Clojure and Elixir, I can speak for Haskell, which I have moved to from Rails. 10x for me is: 1. A 70MB all-in binary to deploy, using 1-3MB of memory when running (has a build in HTTP(S) server), responding in 2-10ms to my requests. Compare that to 700-1500MB of gem…

As a Haskell programmer who has also come from Rails -- I'm a Rails developer now -- and who is also interested in writing a web app in Haskell, I'm very interested in your experiences. Are you on any forums or online communities that have helped you in developing a Haskell web app?

What would you like to know about my experiences? Please ask your questions, I'll answer :)

Re: Existential crisis at Railsconf

#127

Post by saraid216 »

YorickPeterse wrote: post #101
ssmoot wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true. But in practice I've come to the idea it's a meaningless distinction if you're not going to bother to declare the types on your methods/functions. Instances may be Strongly typed in Ruby. Methods are not. So you get almost none of the benefit. It's like Types only exist in Ruby to support Mixins and inheritance chains. Prefer Composition over Inheritance right? But what if through Composition you effecti…

> Instances may be Strongly typed in Ruby. Methods are not. Sure they are, just not all of them: [].first('wat') # => TypeError: no implicit conversion of String into Integer What Ruby lacks is _static typing_ and compile time checks of these types. Instead we have runtime checks in a few places. > Prefer Composition over Inheritance right? But what if through Composition you > effectively lost all your Type informat…

Using introspection in Ruby is generally against convention. There's no reason to care about the class name if it #responds_to? the method you care about calling.

Re: Existential crisis at Railsconf

#128

Post by cies »

jarrettc wrote: post #66
cies wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the idea that every Rails programmer will be switching to Clojure or Elixir! [...] I don't see any 10x advantages [...] I do. While I cannot speak for Clojure and Elixir, I can speak for Haskell, which I have moved to from Rails. 10x for me is: 1. A 70MB all-in binary to deploy, using 1-3MB of memory when running (has a build in HTTP(S) server), responding in 2-10ms to my requests. Compare that to 700-1500MB of gem…

Strong typing on the web has been an intractable problem for me so far. Sure, I can have strong typing in my server-side code. But so many errors result from the interaction between the server, CSS, HTML, and JS. For example, you define a route at the path `/apples` but send an AJAX request to `/oranges` instead. Or you write ` ` but query it with `div.oranges` instead. These are very much like type errors or name er…

When using Haskell it feels like I more clearly have to deal with those not-strongly-types-environment issues. I have to write some interface code (which surely takes some "extra" time) to pull un-strong into Haskell; but then the unstronglyness is represented strongly in Haskell types and has to be dealt with accordingly. This reduces funny bugs that may otherwise arise when overseeing corner cases.

Main hometaker: it's like in Haskell I have to do more work up-front, to enjoy much better productivity down the road.

Re: Existential crisis at Railsconf

#129

Post by __david__ »

kyllo wrote: post #110
AlwaysBCoding wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can write Ember/Angular/Knockout etc... in ClojureScript (I've done it before) but it comes out feeling weird and unnatural. You always feel like you're trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. The preferred solution is to use a ClojureScript wrapper around ReactJS and write your own event handling logic. I'm a big fan of the Reagent library which wraps React with a dead simple API. I believe it's the best U…

This is the strongest argument for Clojure in web programming. HTML (and all XML-based UI frameworks) are just tree data structures, so it's trivial to represent them as s-expressions and manipulate them using normal Clojure code, then render them to HTML at the last moment, instead of having to use different syntax to inject code into templates. Lisp/Scheme languages are uniquely well-suited to the problem domain.

But lisp/Clojure actually holds no real advantage in this area. Javascript, Ruby, Perl, Python, etc. all have built in lists and list-of-lists (ie, trees). They all have map, filter, etc. to manipulate their native lists and hashes/objects/maps in similar ways to lisp/Clojure.

http://jsml.org is just one example (Javascript). I know similar things exist in Perl and I'm sure Ruby and Python have them as well. If not, it's literally something you can write in a couple hours.

Re: Existential crisis at Railsconf

#130

Post by cies »

ionforce wrote: post #62
cies wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the idea that every Rails programmer will be switching to Clojure or Elixir! [...] I don't see any 10x advantages [...] I do. While I cannot speak for Clojure and Elixir, I can speak for Haskell, which I have moved to from Rails. 10x for me is: 1. A 70MB all-in binary to deploy, using 1-3MB of memory when running (has a build in HTTP(S) server), responding in 2-10ms to my requests. Compare that to 700-1500MB of gem…

But isn't that like saying a healthy person can run 10x faster than someone with a limp? For context, my background has been predominantly in a dynamic language, but now I've drank all the typed kool-aid, so I'm sold, as it seems you are as well. So we're essentially saying typed is 10x better than dynamic, but was dynamic ever really a good place to start with?

I'd say dynamic has its place. Especially Ruby since it can serve as a stepping stone for the imperative-minded into functional.

> typed is 10x better than dynamic

10x what? Rails' community is many-x larger then Yesod's, in that case dynamic wins.

:)

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