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Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?

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Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?

#141

Post by timuckun »

aczerepinski wrote: post #117
mountainriver wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at a company with a large Ruby monolith and it’s a disaster. If you’re face deep in the Ruby ecosystem then I’m sure it makes sense, but trying to build services alongside it is truly awful. You want a scalable system that’s easy to write and will grow with you? Write basic Go services.

I've had great experiences with both Ruby and Go. Both are a joy to write, and can handle most use cases. When I'm writing Ruby I sometimes wish I had Go's type system and lightning fast test suites. When I'm writing Go, I sometimes wish there were more conventions so I didn't burn so much time thinking through the absolute perfect way to architect every little thing. Still, they're both wonderful languages that hope…

Use Sorbet. It provides a better type system than the go typing system.

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?

#142

Post by lucasarruda »

Super relevant! And there are tons of companies looking for Rails developers!

I know some people of the community moved to Rust or Node. But the Rails ecosystem is still the most complete out there.

The framework, as the language, is still evolving, getting quicker and integrating will all sorts of other tools (GraphQL, Elastic, etc).

Ruby is much faster in 2.7/3.x as it was in 1.9/2.0 era.

Rails is starting to try dropping node and all the JS package craziness. But still supports all them. So you can pretty much do HTML-over-the-wire, plain jQuery or go full-blown React/GraphQL/API using webpack or similar.

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?

#143

Post by weatherlite »

nobleach wrote: post #132
weatherlite wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My main point here is, that while one can work hard to try and tune Rails (Shopify's done it, Stripe's done it) That's what I'm saying - you don't need to "work hard" to tune Rails in 99% of cases - your bottlenecks (if any) will probably be in the database layer. k8s simply solves it, so unless your argument is "infrastructure costs" or something I don't agree with your case. Shopify has such tremendous scale I th…

Yes, scaling horizontally can be quite expensive. For a startup that begins their journey with Rails, and finds out quickly how expensive that is, it can be a show stopper. Shopify and Stripe are used as an example simply because I want to agree that it is possible - given a ton of resources. So, if I could tell you, that for your next startup, you could start with something that is easier and cheaper to scale (I fin…

We are not going to agree here probably. Another anecdote - because of our company's microservice/k8s architecture each dev works on their own k8s cluster. While some services are shared - most are not. That means we pay more for dev infrastructure than our production bill! So if optimizing infra from the start is the game - why is everyone doing micro services?

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?

#144

Post by weatherlite »

mountainriver wrote: post #134
likortera wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the usual "reasoning" is that Go is easier to maintain, faster, will require less hardware, etc... all of those things might be true. What is not told in is the other side of the story, the one where you will have to write, test, document and maintain a TON more code... which usually ends up in just overall lower quality as it is pretty hard to find developers writing better code than the code you usually find…

Go autodocuments really well Go has better safeguards to prevent bad dev behavior There shouldn't be any more tests, you're testing an API either way

What do you mean there shouldn't be any more tests?

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?

#145

Post by wilsonsilva »

ecshafer wrote: post #71

Shopify Developer here (opinions are my own) we are running Ruby on Rails (obviously) and we do well with it. It's fast to develop, fast to deploy, fast to test. I have no complaints with it. I would say my gut says that there are fewer bugs, fewer issues, fewer on call incidences, less downtime, and faster development speed than when I worked in a Java shop with micro-services and serverless and plenty of modern thi…

"Technical culture, discipline, quality of engineers and leadership matter so much more than what your tools are imo."

Yes! Behind every principle there's a promise. https://twitter.com/jessethanley/status/813904788702183425

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?

#146

Post by likortera »

mountainriver wrote: post #129
likortera wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been at a company that did this, they started migrating everything to Go because it was the new cool thing to do and everyone was in love with it. One year later it was a mess of network calls, no ORMs and nearly-raw queries because who needs an ORM, migrations run by SQL statements on bash scripts because who needs migrations. Validations were custom wrappers on some validation libraries and validation errors w…

Huh, well I've written lots of Go services and worked in lots of Go architectures and it was all worked really well actually. Looks a lot better than spaghetti code in a monolith Maybe you're doing it wrong?

Just on time! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31191700

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?

#147

Post by hipertracker »

After years spent with Ruby and Rails, and some work with Go, Elixir, and Phoenix I switched finally to Python and Django. It's fast, productive, very mature and you can find a library for whatever I imagine. I like Jupiter notebooks, Pydantic, multiprocessing, pandas, and other libs.

I tried to get used to Go several times but it always failed. Go lacks an interactive console. Its syntax is ugly and very limited and not expressive, which means I had to reinvent the wheel all over the time. Why the heck Go has not even have reduce function? It is true, that using Go ends with a TONS of verbose code. The same functionality in another language can be built in a fraction of the time and will have a much simpler and smaller code size

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?

#148

Post by wainstead »

likortera wrote: post #99
mountainriver wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at a company with a large Ruby monolith and it’s a disaster. If you’re face deep in the Ruby ecosystem then I’m sure it makes sense, but trying to build services alongside it is truly awful. You want a scalable system that’s easy to write and will grow with you? Write basic Go services.

I've been at a company that did this, they started migrating everything to Go because it was the new cool thing to do and everyone was in love with it. One year later it was a mess of network calls, no ORMs and nearly-raw queries because who needs an ORM, migrations run by SQL statements on bash scripts because who needs migrations. Validations were custom wrappers on some validation libraries and validation errors w…

> One year later it was a mess of network calls, no ORMs and nearly-raw queries because who needs an ORM, migrations run by SQL statements on bash scripts because who needs migrations.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905.

> if just 10% of the effort were put on improving the existing Rails application, all the Go microservices crazynes that was going on at this place would have been avoided.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Gosh I'm old.

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?

#149

Post by wainstead »

rapfaria wrote: post #35
CuriouslyC wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That post seems extremely suspect. I'm guessing that what they mean when they say "the most in demand skills" is the skills that when present on a resume, increase the odds of a user being contacted by recruiters, which isn't so much in demand as hard to find. By that metric COBOL would probably have been at the top of the list if hired had clients that used it.

The fact that there's entries for Ruby and Ruby on Rails also makes me think this, perhaps this data was just parsed.

I thought that was strange myself.

At the bottom of the page we get:

Methodology

This report is based on proprietary data gathered and analyzed by Hired’s data science teams. For the purpose of this report, Hired examined software engineering candidate interview requests and salary data from January 2020 through December 2021 inclusive. The data included reflects over 366,000 interactions between companies and software engineering candidates during this time period.

In addition to our proprietary data, we collected survey responses from more than 2,000 software engineers on the Hired marketplace to inform our understanding of software engineers’ working preferences.

Re: Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still relevant?

#150

Post by cutler »

mountainriver wrote: post #45
digisign wrote: post #34

Ruby has been on the downswing for a while, getting squeezed from all sides from the meteoric rise of Python on one side, JS/Typescript on the other, to higher performing static languages on another: https://octoverse.github.com/#top-languages-over-the-years It also has a funky syntax, while not a big deal, doesn't do it any favors in a C --> Javascript world. Django, golang, etc. are free. I don't recommend starting…

This is the right answer. Yes people still write on rails but in my experience it’s because they haven’t used other tools. I had a couple die hard rails members at my last company who claimed nothing was better. We made them write Go for a year and now they are die hard Go fans. If I were writing a web app I would start with Go. It’s a great language that’s easy to learn and fast to write, with all the security of st…

Go is great until you need to interface with a C library via cgo then you are in a world of pain with segfaults and the general mismatch between goroutines and C's ideas about concurrency.
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