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Returning to Rails in 2026

markround.com

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Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#181

Post by eudamoniac »

sensanaty wrote: post #110

I love Rails, but after working for a few places with huge Rails codebases and then several other places with .NET and other frameworks with actual typing, I just can't go back to Rails for anything that isn't a personal project. Working with a large codebase with an untyped codebase is just a nightmare, even with powerful IDEs like RubyMine that are able to cover some of the paint points. I wonder how good Sorbet is…

I worked with Rails a lot. In my experience, every rails dev who is fanatical about how much they love Rails, also has little to no experience with strong types. Of the ones who later try types, they no longer love Rails. Personally I quit Rails entirely because of lack of types. No, RBS and Sorbet are not even close to good enough.

Also, every enterprise rails app I've seen (seven, to date) has been really poorly written/architected in a way that other backends just weren't. Even the fairly new ones felt like legacy code already.

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#182

Post by WJW »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #123
WJW wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but GP said "In reality it's not that much".

Not much work every few months turns into a lot over years, especially if you skip a few of those "every few months" events.

That is obviously true but doesn't mean as much as you seem to think. Washing laundry is also not much work but it adds up to a lot over the years, especially if you skip a few weeks of laundry every once in a while. That is not an excuse to not do it.

The answer is the same in both cases: acquire some discipline and treat maintenance with the respect it deserves.

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#183

Post by freedomben »

mark_round wrote: post #63
bronlund wrote: post #7

I've never used Rails, but I agree upon "the state of the modern landscape". Instead of looking backwards, I tried to look forward, and what I found was Elixir and the Phoenix framework.

You're about the 5th person now in as many days who has recommended Elixir when I mentioned I was building a project in Ruby. I'll definitely have to check it out for my next project (whatever that may be!) Can you expand on why you found it so appealing or "holy crap, this is awesome" things I should look at first ?

I am/was a huge Ruby fanboy, and I used Rails a lot and loved it (though had some criticisms around too much "magic"). I made the jump to Elixir/Phoenix around 8 years ago, and have loved it. Phoenix to me basically "fixed" all the things I didn't like about Rails (basically opacity and hard-to-find-where-it's-happening stuff due to someone metaprogramming aggressively). I will admit that I've been a functional programming fan for a very long time too. I always write my ruby code in a functional style unless there's a good reason not to (which is increasingly rare).

I still love and use ruby a ton for scripting, and still reach for Sinatra for super simple server needs, but Phoenix is my go-to stack these days.

I've also found the Elixir community to be amazing in the same ways the Ruby community is/was. It's not all roses, for example there's not as many libraries out there. Distribution is also not awesome so for example I currently use ruby or rust when writing CLIs. But for anything distributed (especially web) Phoenix is amazing.

This is a self plug, but I did a conference talk introducing Ruby veterans to Elixir/Phoenix some years ago. It's probably aged a bit, but should still be pretty accurate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPWMBDTPMkQ

The original conference talk is here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSoz7q37KGE), though the made-for-youtube version above is better because it's slightly updated, and I didn't run out of time :-)

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#184

Post by morpheuskafka »

sriramgonella wrote: post #148

[flagged]

This "feels like" first sentence / "curious if" ending question patterns seems to be coming from some LLM? I have seen the same across several online communities suddenly and frequently as of a few weeks ago. Notably the use of "I've seen" and "feels like" suggest the model is either prompted to act as a person or is one of the older models not strongly trained not to.

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#185

Post by z3ugma »

morpheuskafka wrote: post #184
sriramgonella wrote: post #148

[flagged]

This "feels like" first sentence / "curious if" ending question patterns seems to be coming from some LLM? I have seen the same across several online communities suddenly and frequently as of a few weeks ago. Notably the use of "I've seen" and "feels like" suggest the model is either prompted to act as a person or is one of the older models not strongly trained not to.

Nah read my own comment history. I tend to phrase things this way a lot too because it positions it as opinion/curiosity rather than arrogant / confident statement?

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#186

Post by stouset »

fourseventy wrote: post #179
mattsears wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is it about large untyped codebases that make it a nightmare?

If you make a change to the return types of a function for example you have to manually find all of the different references to that function and fix the code to handle the change. Since there are no compile time errors it's hard to know that you got everything and haven't just caused a bug.

Especially with duck-typing, you might also assume that a function that previously returned true-false will work if it now returns a String or nil. Semantically they’re similar, but String conveys more information (did something, here’s details vs did(n’t) do something).

But if someone is actually relying on literal true/false instead of truthiness, you now have a bug.

I say this as a Ruby evangelist and apologist, who deeply loves the language and who’s used it professionally and still uses it for virtually all of my personal projects.

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#187

Post by bartread »

oorza wrote: post #83
bartread wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've just started using RoR for a live greenfield project since New Year. Honestly, breath of fresh air. It's the closest I've come to that old school "in the box" desktop development experience you used to get from building desktop software with Visual Studio or IntelliJ IDEA or NetBeans or Eclipse or any of the other IDEs of the 90s/00s (I never used Delphi or VB but I imagine in some sense they were even moreso th…

TS doesn't "bin off" duck typing, it's a fundamentally structural type system. It's statically analyzed ducks, all the way down - when nominal behavior is preferred, people have to bend over backwards. Either you are using the wrong vocabulary or I don't think you've bothered to actually learn Typescript. In any case, it's the programming language that successfully brought high-level type system concepts like type al…

> Either you are using the wrong vocabulary or I don't think you've bothered to actually learn Typescript.

All right, fine: TypeScript uses structural typing which is if you like a specialisation of duck typing but, whatever, compared with JS's unadorned duck typing it still leads to embellishment of the resulting code in ways that I don't enjoy.

I've been using TypeScript across different projects at different companies since 2013 and I've absolutely given it an honest go... but I just don't like it. I even allowed its use at a mid-size company where I was CTO because it fit well with React and a sensible person picks their battles, but I still didn't like it.

I'm now in the very privileged position where I don't have to use it, and I don't even have to allow it a foot in the door.

Now I'm sure that won't last forever, and I'll have to work with TypeScript again. I'll do it - because I'm a professional - but I'm still entitled to an opinion, and that opinion remains that I don't like the language. After 13 years of use I feel pretty confident my opinion has settled and is unlikely to change. I find it deeply unenjoyable to work with. BUT the plus side is that in the era of LLMs perhaps I no longer need to worry so much about have to deal with it directly when it eventually does impinge upon my professional life again.

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#188

Post by pier25 »

I spent 2024 and 2025 trying all the big fullstack monolithic frameworks (Laravel, Rails, .NET, Django). There are differences of course but they all suck so much for doing frontend.

In part because for a modern frontend dx you will need hot reload, bundling, etc. But even if you make an SPA and only use eg .NET for an API, using something like OpenAPI to share the schema is a subpar solution. There's really nothing as good as sharing TS types across your whole app(s).

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#190

Post by rdoherty »

sensanaty wrote: post #110

I love Rails, but after working for a few places with huge Rails codebases and then several other places with .NET and other frameworks with actual typing, I just can't go back to Rails for anything that isn't a personal project. Working with a large codebase with an untyped codebase is just a nightmare, even with powerful IDEs like RubyMine that are able to cover some of the paint points. I wonder how good Sorbet is…

It's not just the untyped problems, the runtime definitions of functions, properties, etc make it nearly impossible to debug unless you have the state of your production data locally. (Or you ssh into your prod server and open up a REPL, load the state and introspect everything there). Good luck debugging locally in a nice IDE. It's a horrific nightmare. I use to love Ruby until I had to debug it live.
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