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After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply

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Re: After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply

#161

Post by busterarm »

askyourmother wrote: post #160
busterarm wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all about how you prioritize the problems you need to solve. At my current job we primarily use Wordpress. Why Wordpress? Because we have a large and non-technical content team, 260+ websites and several tens of thousands of pages of content that need to go up quickly. We're just 4 developers - about 1 for every 8 content & marketing people we have. We spend very little of our time on frontend. Tell me that you'…

WordPress is a pretty crazy codebase, yet, it seems sane compared to Rails. Interesting that WordPress as a service are moving to a node.js backend from PHP - even they chase shiny too

Do you know of any decent (modern stack) WPaaS besides Pantheon?

Re: After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply

#162

Post by throwanem »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #107
danenania wrote: post #64

Moving on from Rails sounds great until you try to build a serious web app with one of the alternatives. While I think that many of the architectural criticisms are valid, Rails demonstrates the primacy of ecosystem and strong conventions over language design and cs theory. 'Tomorrow's' languages and frameworks would do well to take heed. Winning this war has as much to do with culture and marketing as algorithms and…

These things depends a lot on how you build an app, too. All our webapps these days are thin React apps (with server-side rendering) that don't have a dedicated backend. Instead, they talk to a group of generic microservices. We've been doing this style of development since around 2010. With this methodology, a lot of Rails' ergonomic concerns (templating, the split between rendering HTML vs. data, etc.) just melt aw…

Not OP, but my guess is that would count as "in the weeds right off the bat"; the impression I get is that a lot of Rails's value proposition revolves around being able to start using it without actually needing to know or understand very much. (Which is not a bad thing, exactly! Its power as a rapid prototyping tool comes in large part from this trait. Unfortunately, so does its strong tendency to produce unmaintainable code.)

Re: After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply

#163

Post by shams93 »

I've seen the biggest benefit from a client heavy approach even with rails. Make the api the core of your system, makes it easier to refactor down the road into microservices. For a lot of web apps there is no real need for server side templating, once you get beyond server templating its easier to make native versions of your app or use xamarian to access the same api from a common c# codebase for native. Place your business logic in the api and there's really nothing for someone to steal from view source because your clients are just REST wrappers.

Re: After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply

#164

Post by cag_ii »

danenania wrote: post #64

Moving on from Rails sounds great until you try to build a serious web app with one of the alternatives. While I think that many of the architectural criticisms are valid, Rails demonstrates the primacy of ecosystem and strong conventions over language design and cs theory. 'Tomorrow's' languages and frameworks would do well to take heed. Winning this war has as much to do with culture and marketing as algorithms and…

Why compare Rails with Clojure (a framework vs. a language)?

I think if you more fairly compare Rails with Django, Flask, Laravel, etc. you might find the differences aren't so great.

Re: After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply

#165

Post by wwweston »

Benjamin_Dobell wrote: post #67

Recently I upgraded a project from Rails 3.2.x to 4.0.x... 4.0.x -> 4.1.x... 4.1.x -> 4.2.x It was, and still is, a nightmare. Technically speaking Rails itself upgraded in a reasonably straight-forward way, just follow the documentation (well and a few blog posts here and there for the things missed in the official docs). But all the additional Gems, and dependencies of those Gems (and so on) made the process excruc…

This is exactly the past problem I've had with every Rails app I've been involved with (none of them have been from scratch) -- even during the setup process there's an immediate reckoning with gem snarls and other version issues.

Re: After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply

#166

Post by btdiehr »

askyourmother wrote: post #160
busterarm wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all about how you prioritize the problems you need to solve. At my current job we primarily use Wordpress. Why Wordpress? Because we have a large and non-technical content team, 260+ websites and several tens of thousands of pages of content that need to go up quickly. We're just 4 developers - about 1 for every 8 content & marketing people we have. We spend very little of our time on frontend. Tell me that you'…

WordPress is a pretty crazy codebase, yet, it seems sane compared to Rails. Interesting that WordPress as a service are moving to a node.js backend from PHP - even they chase shiny too

Is it not an advantage for average users to be able to do both the front end and back end knowing only a single language?

Re: After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply

#167

Post by DevinTheDude »

brightball wrote: post #97

At the moment, the alternatives mentioned to Rails aren't actually alternatives. You are still going to make major trade offs in productivity compared to Rails... Unless he's talking about Elixir and Phoenix, which IMHO is the future of web development.

As someone who has never heard of Elixir/Phoenix, why do you think it's the future. What does it do better than Rails? I'm looking to start a new web application, and I'm open to new technologies.

Re: After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply

#168

Post by szx »

askyourmother wrote: post #156
noam87 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elixir/Phoenix gets this right. Working on a side project right now and so far it's a very enjoyable experience. I find the abstractions much more intuitive. The framework as a whole is just as "magical" for fast prototyping, but it's composed of much simpler individual modules that are easy to wrap one's head around. It's surprising how mature the whole ecosystem feels considering it's still quite niche. It helps to…

Wait till hex is filled with crap like gems are today. The Rails programmers are coming to elixir as it had already been called the new Rails, and they will follow the pragprog book to it the new promised land. If you enjoyed early adopter status in elixir phoenix, wait till it is Rails mk 2. It will suck big time.

You have a point there, but I do wonder if this is inevitable, or if (1) the language does make a difference in that regard and (2) the community can help steer newcomers in the right direction and establish best practices, standards of quality, etc. etc. (cf. Clojure?)

As a side note, I feel like this has happened to some degree to the React ecosystem. I can no longer count on packages to be of decent quality.

Re: After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply

#169

Post by geebee »

IshKebab wrote: post #59
quetzthecoatl wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also, the image of a pig's face as electric socket while hilarious, shows how much the original author mis understood duck typing. It's not just look like duck, but also quack like a duck. Since when does a pig's nose behave like an electric socket? The idea behind duck typing is about concentrating on behavior instead of identities. He completed missed it.

It was just a funny picture. And besides, duck typing doesn't rely on things behaving the same. It relies on them appearing the same (in terms of method names). A pigs nose appears like an electrical socket in that it has holes in the same places. So actually it is a pretty accurate picture. That said, I don't think duck typing is Python's biggest problem. Go sort-of has duck typing, in that you can make a type imple…

A language with more strictly enforced interface inheritance would probably require a more, uh, deliberate intent to stick an electrical outlet into pig's snout, but you could probably still go ahead and do this if you were really hellbent on it.

I will concede that duck typing allows you to do this sort of thing more casually, though.

Re: After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply

#170

Post by DonnyV »

manifestsilence wrote: post #85
Benjamin_Dobell wrote: post #67

Recently I upgraded a project from Rails 3.2.x to 4.0.x... 4.0.x -> 4.1.x... 4.1.x -> 4.2.x It was, and still is, a nightmare. Technically speaking Rails itself upgraded in a reasonably straight-forward way, just follow the documentation (well and a few blog posts here and there for the things missed in the official docs). But all the additional Gems, and dependencies of those Gems (and so on) made the process excruc…

I've found upgrade hell can apply to C#/dotnet stuff too. I work on a project that has attempted to upgrade Entity framework versions multiple times and keeps pushing it off because we get buried in compile time errors. It's a case where Microsoft supported several different paths to architect an app and then quietly deprecated half of them - database first vs. code first, POCOs vs. ObjectContext, etc. and we happene…

The problem is not C# or .NET. The issue is Entity framework. Either stop being scared of using SQL and use something like PetaPoco or stop trying to turn objects into records and use Mongodb and just store the damn objects.
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