Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails

blog.testdouble.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 65 posts

Re: How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails

#21

Post by blowski »

sho wrote: post #12
jamesfinlayson wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's easy to say it's declining based on things like Red Monk's ranking, but with GitHub, Stripe and Shopify behind it, it's not going anywhere soon. And apparently Rails us is slowly increasing: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/php-maintains-an-eno...

Isn't that graph hopelessly tainted by eg. the dominance of WordPress? I mean, yes that's PHP, but just because 80% of sites are running it doesn't mean 80% of development is in PHP. Far from it.

All those kind of charts have the same problem. It’s like asking “what food do people like the most?”, and answering “rice” because so many people eat it every day. The problem is that the question is so vague you can answer it many different ways, and all of the answers are correct.

What people usually mean when they use those stats is “look how popular my choice of language is”.

Re: How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails

#22

Post by arthurcolle »

gscho wrote: post #2

This is a bit off topic but I wanted to say I’m really glad there are still people out there hacking on some ruby + Postgres projects and writing about it. I feel that ruby is an excellent language and dread the demise of it.

This feels like the idiom of 'those who can't do, teach' except its...

puts "those who aren't building interesting systems in #{RUBY_ENGINE} write comments about #{RUBY_ENGINE}'s demise"

No one cares what you are developing your product in. Maybe some intern during an interview is salivating about your $BESPOKE_IMPLMENTATION, but at the end of the day, Ruby and other dynamic languages solved a very explicit problem of "hey compiled languages are great and I can design a very high level system and then needle down into whatever I want to behave in very explicit ways, but damn I want to get this done in like 30 minutes instead of over 3 days"

I feel like anyone who needs a blog post about some sorceress' concoction of systems to feel validated about making something that solves a problem, especially a problem of theirs - even if it's for your grandma, or a few close friends, or even just yourself... you just don't get it. waxing philosophically about tech is fun and gets any number of rocks off but at the end of the day, if you love scheme and know how to whip up something in 30 seconds that would take an hour in java 17 pro max (ellison edition), go for it, publish it, run it on your raspberry pi. This fixation on chasing the dragon every 15 minutes is a complete waste of time and is effectively super counterproductive.

How many breaking changes has node gone through? Our boy Ryan Dahl literally reimplemented a JS runtime as Deno in Rust because he was like "ya i made node and it was cool for a bit but this is getting out of hand" Great! Use Deno! Use Node! Use Fortran if you're productive in it. The idea that you have to curate what shit you're learning because of a predicted decline in the ecosystem of said shit is such a waste of time and I shake my head in sadness at anyone who isn't learning something because they fear it might be deprecated tomorrow. Be the change you want to see in the world. If anything, the APIs youre using in $POPULAR_LANGUAGE will be deprecated and the APIs that are not getting blog posts on HN are actually still stable. Run it in a container! Who cares!

You know what will be not important? deep ponderences of some tech rolled out over an API like AWS Lambdas or Google's AMP stuff, or React, or Angular (remember that? Lmao! Only a few years ago!). Focus on fundamentals and avoid the constant churn of new features that get deprecated 6 quarters from now.

Re: How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails

#23

Post by Mikeb85 »

itake wrote: post #6
rdhgfdgrdhgfdg wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it demised? Shopify, Stripe and many new YC startups use it.

Rails hasn't had any interesting updates since version 4, and arguably introduced a few regressions IMHO (I'm looking at you, active storage and action cable) Ruby hasn't evolved much either. Rails only scales so far and then scaling gets really challenging, obviously the named companies have figured it out, but its not easy. For example, rails due to the high coupling between models and the database, rspec test get…

Rails doesn't scale? Github's the largest code repository site in the world. Stripe's one of the largest fintech sites in the world. Shopify is one of the largest ecommerce sites in the world. There's also Airbnb, TripAdvisor, many others that are huge.

Also, you can write shitty, slow code in any language. You can make too many calls to the DB in any language. You can also scale to Google size in any language.

Python isn't a quick language. Also most of the ML bits are C++ bits. Ruby is faster than Python for most things. But Google (and others) have done well with Python (and other bits). Facebook got huge with PHP (which no one truly likes).

Ruby is a fine language (also very pleasant to use), Rails powers many huge companies, sometimes nitpicks are just that.

Re: How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails

#24

Post by jamesfinlayson »

sho wrote: post #12
jamesfinlayson wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's easy to say it's declining based on things like Red Monk's ranking, but with GitHub, Stripe and Shopify behind it, it's not going anywhere soon. And apparently Rails us is slowly increasing: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/php-maintains-an-eno...

Isn't that graph hopelessly tainted by eg. the dominance of WordPress? I mean, yes that's PHP, but just because 80% of sites are running it doesn't mean 80% of development is in PHP. Far from it.

It is, but discounting PHP because of WordPress from that graph is still interesting - I doubt there are free one-click installs for ASP.Net like there are for WordPress for example, but are there for Ruby on Rails?

Re: How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails

#25

Post by jamesfinlayson »

joelbluminator wrote: post #17
muglug wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, three companies worth an estimated $300B can keep any language alive. It’s fascinating to track the second wind of out-of-fashion languages, held aloft by a few mature companies that depend on it.

I'd argue even without them Ruby would be alive in the sense that the core language would get frequent updates. Even Perl is still alive https://github.com/Perl/perl5 , even in a healthier state than I would have thought.

Oh wow, Perl is still getting monthly updates - I knew it was on the decline but I thought the whole Perl 6/Perl 7/Perl 11 fragmentation had left things in a worse state.

Re: How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails

#26

Post by Mikeb85 »

swader999 wrote: post #15
wpietri wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the product. The Rails architecture is fine for CRUD apps, and Heroku will happily take more and more money for more and more database capacity. As long as your ARPU is solid, you're fine scaling like that. But there are more things in the world than CRUD apps. I'm building tools to track hate on social media, and there's a lot of social media out there. Rails, or any RDBMS-centered architecture, won't cut…

You still have the GIL in python to overcome.

Not really. ML in Python basically means lots of C++ libraries and you can just split processes as much as you want as it's easy to parallelize. You could do the same in R, Ruby, any scripting language really (but Python already has all the glue stuff ready to go and is easy).

Re: How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails

#27

Post by gouda-gouda »

Ruby is alive and well. We don’t use Rails specifically (Hanami + ROM.rb + DRY.rb), but absolutely love Ruby as a language and the ecosystem surrounding it. It’s productive, and as powerful as you need it to be.

When it comes to building feature-rich web applications quickly and sanely, Ruby is still hard to beat IMO.

Re: How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails

#28

Post by paavohtl »

jamesfinlayson wrote: post #24
sho wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that graph hopelessly tainted by eg. the dominance of WordPress? I mean, yes that's PHP, but just because 80% of sites are running it doesn't mean 80% of development is in PHP. Far from it.

It is, but discounting PHP because of WordPress from that graph is still interesting - I doubt there are free one-click installs for ASP.Net like there are for WordPress for example, but are there for Ruby on Rails?

The comparison does not make sense. WordPress is a CMS that happens to be written in PHP, while ASP.NET and Ruby on Rails are frameworks for building web services which don't do anything by themselves. At best you would get a blank "Hello world" page and nothing more from a "one-click" installer.

Re: How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails

#29

Post by void_mint »

stephenhuey wrote: post #14
wpietri wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the product. The Rails architecture is fine for CRUD apps, and Heroku will happily take more and more money for more and more database capacity. As long as your ARPU is solid, you're fine scaling like that. But there are more things in the world than CRUD apps. I'm building tools to track hate on social media, and there's a lot of social media out there. Rails, or any RDBMS-centered architecture, won't cut…

For implementing ye olde business logic, which is far more common in software development than cool tech such as ML that is discussed a disproportionally high amount compared to its real-world usage, Ruby on Rails wins. Sure, there are lots of frameworks that are good for shipping business features quickly, but Ruby on Rails is still among the leaders of that group due to concise code, magical defaults that give you…

You and the person you're responding to are agreeing that you should use the right tool for the job, and there are plenty of jobs that Rails isn't right for.

Re: How to build a search engine with Ruby on Rails

#30

Post by Graffur »

gouda-gouda wrote: post #27

Ruby is alive and well. We don’t use Rails specifically (Hanami + ROM.rb + DRY.rb), but absolutely love Ruby as a language and the ecosystem surrounding it. It’s productive, and as powerful as you need it to be. When it comes to building feature-rich web applications quickly and sanely, Ruby is still hard to beat IMO.

Doesn't React beat it quick easily?
Post reply on HN