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Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

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Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#21

Post by whalesalad »

paulie_a wrote: post #13
whalesalad wrote: post #4

I commented a few months ago that if I was starting a new company today I’d use Rails without hesitation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17355776 Well, I’m starting a company and our current prototype is Rails. I don’t regret my decision at all, although after spending the last four years writing exclusively Python it’s been a little jarring. The muscle memory is still there though and after two weeks I’m almos…

To be fair the technology stack is almost irrelevant when you are starting a company. write it in perl, python, rails, hell write it in old school cgi and use c++. It all comes down to how many sales did you make today. The clients will rarely care what language was used behind the scenes.

That’s a pretty myopic way to look at it. Sure, use what you know and forget the branding of your technology, I agree. But you need to be cognizant of short term vs long term gains, gasoline you can pour on the fire (libraries and integrations), the team you are going to build, the deployment story, the ops story, etc...

I’ve seen companies that made poor technical decisions up front spend years paying for those mistakes. One could argue that those mistakes are what even put them in the position to where they could pay em down... but there is definitely a way to measure twice/cut once and save yourself from a world of hurt while still moving quickly and making sales.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#22

Post by sircastor »

thinkingkong wrote: post #16

I mean... Let's pause for a minute and remove the year, and remove the language / framework. What are we trying to accomplish? If we know something really well and there are enough developers to support an ecosystem and the talent pool in your is big enough just use whatever you want. PHP in 2018? SURE. C++ in 2018? SURE (You masochist) Rails in 2018? Youre damn right I would. GO in 2018? OK. Fine. Whatever. This is…

This was pretty much my response as well. If there are lots of people who can write it, and write it in such a way that it's maintainable, go with what you like most.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#23

Post by nurettin »

RoR is relevant as long as the community is active, as long as there is job demand (see crossover, Stackoverflow, etc.).

It is an excellent framework with gems to act as plugins (rack middleware) to serve websockets, forums, admin interfaces all with a few lines of configuration. Google, Microsoft, Facebook all maintain Ruby libraries in GitHub. So as long as you are doing Joe's textile website, it is the right tool.

Cloud scaling rails can be expensive, as apparent from horror stories [0] but a few manually managed instances with a load balancer and good web servers can go a long way.

It lacks development time relative to python which cater to domains such as data processing and artificial categorization. With extension libraries such as helix [1] which utilize rust to create native extensions and enough development time it has the potential to dominate those fields in the future.

One honorable mention is JRuby and while it isn't kotlin in terms of efficiency, it still lets you use Java libraries when you need any sort of domain libraries.

In conclusion, I'd say it is still pretty relevant today.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5228200 [1] https://usehelix.com

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#24

Post by mosen »

sho wrote: post #9

Of course it is. The question is kind of silly. For basically any startup, my advice would be: unless and until you can credibly explain a genuine reason why you can't use Rails - use Rails. I'm not some crazy fanboy but until someone can actually name a seriously competitive, batteries-included, all-in-one framework* which delivers everything, or even most of, what Rails does - it is very relevant and you ignore it…

How do you think .NET Core 2.0 MVC compares to Rails nowadays? I've been insanely productive with it. Willing to give Ruby/Rails a try, though.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#26

Post by tptacek »

For whatever it's worth: at Matasano we saw more Rails apps from startups than any other framework.

At Latacora that has changed dramatically; we see Django a lot, rarely Rails, but most commonly we see Go, Python, Node, and Java API servers with React frontends and minimal frameworks.

From my vantage point: Rails is still relevant and still a viable option for building new stuff, but it is less relevant than it used to be.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#27

Post by yellowapple »

RhodesianHunter wrote: post #2

> I would keep learning plain Ruby, Elixir, Phoenix and JavaScript as my side tools > I wouldn’t spend too much time learning programming languages outside that list as you need more tools in your toolbox but too many tools may get your toolbox cluttered You suggest not cluttering your toolbox, but your recommendation is a list of completely interchangeable dynamic languages?

I wouldn't call Ruby and Elixir interchangeable, even if they happen to look superficially similar on the surface.

I would recommend learning either language outside the context of a framework like Rails or Phoenix, though. There's immense value in knowing the underlying libraries (Rack and Plug, respectively) and the HTTP servers underlying those (Cowboy and Unicorn/Puma/whatever-is-popular-nowadays, inverse-respectively). Once you know those, you'll either gain an appreciation for the existing frameworks or have the know-how to improve and/or replace them.

Re: Is Rails still relevant in 2018?

#30

Post by PopeDotNinja »

paulie_a wrote: post #13
whalesalad wrote: post #4

I commented a few months ago that if I was starting a new company today I’d use Rails without hesitation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17355776 Well, I’m starting a company and our current prototype is Rails. I don’t regret my decision at all, although after spending the last four years writing exclusively Python it’s been a little jarring. The muscle memory is still there though and after two weeks I’m almos…

To be fair the technology stack is almost irrelevant when you are starting a company. write it in perl, python, rails, hell write it in old school cgi and use c++. It all comes down to how many sales did you make today. The clients will rarely care what language was used behind the scenes.

I refuse to write Perl. If enough people feel the same way, Perl is not a good choice.
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