141–150 of 216 posts
I stopped reading at "Python, the language used in Django, is a language very commonly used for academic purposes, whereas the Ruby community — thanks to Rails — is more business-oriented."...
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Just a disclaimer, I work with Rails every day, but I don't really like it all that much and I really don't like ActiveRecord. We have Rails legacy apps and I maintain one of them. I'd still use Rails for some things, but it I'm pretty picky about what I think it's good for. Having said that, it makes me a bit sad that there are quite a few developers who actively avoid SQL. Granted the syntax is absolutely awful, bu…
I agree! SQL-avoidant developers are something we actively try to screen out in our interviews. (Being too gung-ho about using raw SQL -- something I've been accused of --is bad too, but at least it's not a path of willful ignorance) Granted [SQL's] syntax is absolutely awful, but it is a very useful and powerful language. The concepts behind relational databases are embraced by SQL in ways that I can't imagine in an…
Rails is ideal for the "Get Shit Done" approach to development. However, Ruby's type system does not provide many assurances, making mature codebases harder to maintain, refactor, and extend (as compared to codebases in, say, well-written Java). I am surprised this was not listed as one of the criticisms. Sorbet, a type checker for Ruby, stands to make this criticism less valid: https://sorbet.org/
I have to be honest, I don't understand why people care so much about typed languages. I almost never face type related issues, and when they occur they are the easiest to catch.
Slides here: https://github.com/dlthomas/using-c-types-talk/tree/master/s...
The example is a toy but the technique was developed for (and very successfully used in) a production setting.
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Just a disclaimer, I work with Rails every day, but I don't really like it all that much and I really don't like ActiveRecord. We have Rails legacy apps and I maintain one of them. I'd still use Rails for some things, but it I'm pretty picky about what I think it's good for. Having said that, it makes me a bit sad that there are quite a few developers who actively avoid SQL. Granted the syntax is absolutely awful, bu…
As a counterpoint, I love ActiveRecord. It's a Swiss Army knife that's got pretty much everything you need, you just need to find the right tool and use it. What ActiveRecord isn't is discoverable . Which is to an extent understandable. Its domain is literally anything you could express in SQL. But you really can do anything you want with it, you just have to find the right abstraction. A tool I use a lot is to .to_s…
Ruby code is like poetry. Rails code is like a song. Working with RoR always made you feel being like an artist, instead of being only a software developer. RoR is always my inspiration on how to design a software from start to finish.
Could you link a repo that you feel represents this kinda mentality?
Ruby code is like poetry. Rails code is like a song. Working with RoR always made you feel being like an artist, instead of being only a software developer. RoR is always my inspiration on how to design a software from start to finish.
Perhaps I am an odd duck (I come from heavy Java backend experience including Spring and struts and now Go) but Rails feels incredibly clunky. I am working on a mid-size Rails app and it's a total horror show. Setting up debugger alone was very difficult (had to locate just the right patch version of a ruby gem that would work with my app); I can't just follow the calls because things are wired together behind the sc…
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I've taken the approach of building the monolith first with an architecture that allows me to easily pull parts of it out into services when I hit constraints and need that scalability.
How?
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Rails is slow. Ruby isn’t slow. Ruby has the same thing that every other language has, call outs to C code under the hood for most of the real work. What makes Rails slow is the process around so much object creation and destruction, but this is exclusive to Rails itself. You put a Sidekiq worker up against a Go worker for some background processing and the performance is comparable.
> Ruby has the same thing that every other language has, call outs to C code under the hood for most of the real work. Yes, this is exactly the problem. Ruby is so slow that you end up writing C extensions when you want to do any non-trivial computation. The documentation is bad, the tooling is bad, the build/CI complications are bad, and there's not much community info online about the process. And now your RoR deve…
The trade off that Ruby has always made was maximizing developer productivity. It’s never tried to be the fastest, but it’s plenty fast enough.
Rails is ideal for the "Get Shit Done" approach to development. However, Ruby's type system does not provide many assurances, making mature codebases harder to maintain, refactor, and extend (as compared to codebases in, say, well-written Java). I am surprised this was not listed as one of the criticisms. Sorbet, a type checker for Ruby, stands to make this criticism less valid: https://sorbet.org/
I have to be honest, I don't understand why people care so much about typed languages. I almost never face type related issues, and when they occur they are the easiest to catch.
Fast forward to when the same project grows and matures. Now it is huge and no one knows every subsystem. The original developers skipped town years ago. There are -1x to 10x developers on the team, and contractors who must "hit the ground running." Static typing is now crucial to prevent the whole thing from collapsing like a house of cards.
I recommend the best of both worlds, such as prototyping in a productive language, then port when the design solidifies. Or, use a language that can be gradually typed later as your startup matures into an established company with customers that rely on it.
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1. You can find a RoR developer.
Ha. It's so hard to find Ruby developers. But I will grant that when you do find one, they are usually pretty good developers.
You can find more experienced Ruby devs -- finding someone with multiple years of Elixir would be very difficult.