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Returning to Rails in 2026

markround.com

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Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#211

Post by goatlover »

mike_ivanov wrote: post #203
eudamoniac wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wr…

Ruby is a strongly typed language. I think you are confusing strong typing with static typing.

And by contrast, C is static but weakly typed.

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#213

Post by lowenbjer »

blandflakes wrote: post #205
lowenbjer wrote: post #166

I was part of building the streaming frontend for one of Sweden's largest broadcasters in Rails about 10 years ago. Handled 1M+ concurrent users on Heroku with horizontal scaling. Fun fact: someone on the team literally stayed up monitoring traffic during big live events. It worked. Rails was a great fit for that especially at the time. I moved on, not because Rails failed me, but because the things I started buildin…

> I pick tools by the problem, not loyalty. Good advice that I keep trying to adopt myself, but I have to confess a large personal bias for languages that I like, even if it keeps me from certain classes of problem (I like Ruby, though). What did you move onto for those next things you started building?

I know that feeling. Just because a tool is good doesn't mean you enjoy using it. I moved deeper into streaming infra with Python, C/C++, Go, and funnily enough Elixir. Then a complete path change into fintech and later AI/ML, which meant a lot of JavaScript/TypeScript and reluctant Python. I appreciate the Python ecosystem but find the language itself ugly to read and write. Always a last resort for me. Today it's mostly TypeScript, Go, and Lua.

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#214

Post by ptak_dev »

thiago_fm wrote: post #151
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…

Same. Also became a .net developer after almost 20 years of Ruby/Rails. Nowadays C# is anyways much more expressive than before. Meanwhile Ruby is still very slow. Not to mention how poorly maintained are most Rails projects. People have been "vibe coding" forever. A well-organized and maintained Rails app is great though. I'd definitely consider working with it again, but it really depends on what company it is.

[flagged]

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#215

Post by yawaramin »

mark_round wrote: post #62
louiskottmann wrote: post #35

I've been a Rails DevOps and nowadays a web one-man-show with it for over 10 years and I'd do it again. Not many frameworks have been thriving that long, and there's good reason. It packs everything, is tidy and productive, with a pleasant language to read and write. In the latest Stackoverflow survey, it's back at the "top 5 of desired stacks to use for next project" over a decade after its inception ! Give it a try…

The "one-person framework" thing is a big draw. I'm amazed at how productive I was in it, and it's not just at the code level. Even though I've been doing sysadmin/devops/architect work for over 25 years now, it's just so damn nice now not to have to think about e.g. standing up a HA PostgreSQL cluster or Redis and deployment is largely a solved problem.

> not to have to think about e.g. standing up a HA PostgreSQL cluster or Redis

I don't understand...Rails does not replace a HA PostgreSQL cluster or Redis, they are orthogonal. Why would you not have to think about them?

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#217

Post by Barrin92 »

goatlover wrote: post #210
Salgat wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best perspective I've seen is that statically typed enforcement is basically a unit test done at compile time.

Alan Kay's argument against static typing was it was too limited and didn't capture the domain logic of the sort of types you actually use at a higher level. So you leave it up to the objects to figure out how to handle messages. Given Ruby is a kind of spiritual ancestor of Smalltalk.

the problem is that nobody listened to Alan Kay and writes dynamic code the way they'd write static code but without the types.

I always liked Rich Hickey's point, that you should program on the inside the way you program on the outside. Over the wire you don't rely on types and make sure the entire internet is in type check harmony, it's on you to verify what you get, and that was what Alan Kay thought objects should do.

That's why I always find these complaints a bit puzzling. Yes in a dynamic language like Ruby, Python, Clojure, Smalltalk you can't impose global meaning, but you're not supposed to. If you have to edit countless of existing code just because some sender changed that's an indication you've ignored the principle of letting the recipient interpret the message. It shouldn't matter what someone else puts in a map, only what you take out of it, same way you don't care if the contents of the post truck change as long as your package is in it.

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#218

Post by blandflakes »

lowenbjer wrote: post #213
blandflakes wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I pick tools by the problem, not loyalty. Good advice that I keep trying to adopt myself, but I have to confess a large personal bias for languages that I like, even if it keeps me from certain classes of problem (I like Ruby, though). What did you move onto for those next things you started building?

I know that feeling. Just because a tool is good doesn't mean you enjoy using it. I moved deeper into streaming infra with Python, C/C++, Go, and funnily enough Elixir. Then a complete path change into fintech and later AI/ML, which meant a lot of JavaScript/TypeScript and reluctant Python. I appreciate the Python ecosystem but find the language itself ugly to read and write. Always a last resort for me. Today it's m…

Ha, I can relate WRT Python. I've been doing more Elixir these days for both a really pleasant web experience and because it has some unique primitives baked into the ecosystem that most JVM projects I work on spend a lot of time approximating through grotesque frameworks.

Re: Returning to Rails in 2026

#220

Post by nradov »

Barrin92 wrote: post #217
goatlover wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alan Kay's argument against static typing was it was too limited and didn't capture the domain logic of the sort of types you actually use at a higher level. So you leave it up to the objects to figure out how to handle messages. Given Ruby is a kind of spiritual ancestor of Smalltalk.

the problem is that nobody listened to Alan Kay and writes dynamic code the way they'd write static code but without the types. I always liked Rich Hickey's point, that you should program on the inside the way you program on the outside. Over the wire you don't rely on types and make sure the entire internet is in type check harmony, it's on you to verify what you get, and that was what Alan Kay thought objects shoul…

That's a terrible solution because then you need a bunch of extra parsing and validation code in every recipient object. This becomes impractical once the code base grows to a certain size and ultimately defeats any possible benefit that might have initially been gained with dynamic typing.
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