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DHH answers: What makes Rails a framework worth learning in 2017?

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Re: DHH answers: What makes Rails a framework worth learning in 2017?

#41

Post by allover »

johnbellone wrote: post #36
allover wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are a lot of vocal people who make it seem like you should be doing everything in Go or Angular or what have you Can you give examples of the 'lot of vocal people' saying 'you should be doing everything in Go or Angular'? I don't see this. I only hear this kind of black/white sentiment when filtered via junior devs. Experienced devs I know get there are trade-offs. And I don't see anyone on the React/Angular/…

At least once a week I read comments or a submission about how X should be written in Rust. That's a pretty common occurrence here; if you stay long enough it'll be another language.

I've seen a lot of Rust posts on HN lately, but none saying you must ditch mature frameworks like Rails for Rust equivalents (there aren't any yet, and they know that, for one).

Where's the evidence for this claim DHH/Rails is the only rational force in a sea of extremists?

(Of course the dull reality with real apps is "it's complicated" and most devs are busy grappling with that).

Re: DHH answers: What makes Rails a framework worth learning in 2017?

#42

Post by bigtunacan »

headcanon wrote: post #23
dceddia wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took his comment about "very little activity in integrated solutions" to mean "[in the JavaScript world]" but maybe that's not what he meant. I do think that's pretty true of the JS ecosystem though. There are things like Sails, but most of the "new" stuff that comes out is build systems, tools, small libraries, and view libraries. As to why... it's anyone's guess. My guess is that making a full-stack opinionated f…

> As to why... it's anyone's guess. I think its because recreating rails in javascript just doesn't make sense in the current ecosystem. Either you are rewriting stuff like express from scratch (and why are you doing that?), or you're building on top of those modules and adding configuration conventions and scripts, in which case, congratulations, you've just written Sails. When Rails first got started, ruby didn't h…

Personally I think Sails is pretty cool in it's own right. As far as websockets go I feel like that is one area where Sails makes things dead simple and I've not been amazed by the overcomplicated Rails 5 implementation of websockets.

That said, I don't see Sails gaining a ton of traction even though it's been around for quite some time yet, and with it's security settings and beta status I don't feel great about building production apps with it yet.

Re: DHH answers: What makes Rails a framework worth learning in 2017?

#43

Post by mark_l_watson »

I have been thinking of rails lately. I used both Rails and Merb way back when, but for many years now I have just used Ruby + Sinatra.

I wish that I had a more complex web app to do because it would be fun to get reacquainted with Rails. That probably won't happen since I have been going it the opposite direction, having updated a few Sinatra and PHP sites to be 100% static, and using cloud storage and CDNs.

Re: DHH answers: What makes Rails a framework worth learning in 2017?

#44

Post by ooqr »

meesterdude wrote: post #4

This reinforces what I see a lot too - people creating yet another XYZ, but rarely I see someone go and create an integrated solution to streamline development processes or make things easier or clearer. There are a lot of vocal people who make it seem like you should be doing everything in Go or Angular or what have you, but I want nothing to do with either, and do not have problems that those are meant to solve. I…

I am a rails dev. I inherited a legacy application. The biggest problem with Ruby/Rails is that anything Ruby will allow, someone will do. Ruby is the language I learned data structures and algorithms in, built my first significant projects in. It has a generous wealth of helpful builtins. But it makes me long for strictness, static typing, a language where not just anything can completely modify any other.

Re: DHH answers: What makes Rails a framework worth learning in 2017?

#45

Post by cies »

pmontra wrote: post #14
newsat13 wrote: post #7

So, I have seen rails code and I did not fall in love with the code. Instead what I saw just black magic and all sorts of conventions. Reminded me of perl. You have to invest a lot of time knowing all the magic stuff.

There isn't much black magic. Most of it is pretty sane naming conventions which could be OK in any sw project, plus database schema autodiscovery. The bonus is increased maintainability.

> The bonus is increased maintainability.

It will never have strong-typed discipline though... (sad)

Re: DHH answers: What makes Rails a framework worth learning in 2017?

#47

Post by wrsh07 »

rco8786 wrote: post #34

What does Ruby have to do with immutability

Let's consider the quote:

> You get to use Ruby, which, even in a world that has rediscovered the benefits of functional programming and immutability, remains the most extraordinarily beautiful and luxurious language I’ve yet to encounter.

He's saying there are other beautiful paradigms - especially of the FP variety. However, Ruby is really, really damn elegant.

And he's right; it's a joy. [I say as a C++ dev]

Re: DHH answers: What makes Rails a framework worth learning in 2017?

#48

Post by srssays »

johnbellone wrote: post #36
allover wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are a lot of vocal people who make it seem like you should be doing everything in Go or Angular or what have you Can you give examples of the 'lot of vocal people' saying 'you should be doing everything in Go or Angular'? I don't see this. I only hear this kind of black/white sentiment when filtered via junior devs. Experienced devs I know get there are trade-offs. And I don't see anyone on the React/Angular/…

At least once a week I read comments or a submission about how X should be written in Rust. That's a pretty common occurrence here; if you stay long enough it'll be another language.

Before Rust it was Haskell, before Haskell it was Erlang, and before Erlang it was Lisp.

Re: DHH answers: What makes Rails a framework worth learning in 2017?

#49

Post by astrodust »

tcfunk wrote: post #37
astrodust wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the last few months I've built a brand new Node + Express application, and I've built a brand new Rails 5.x one. ES6 has taken the edge off of some of the more obnoxious parts of JavaScript, but it still has a long way to go to catch up to Ruby, and Express is a cheap imitation of Rails. It takes me over a day to get an Express application up and running. There's dozens of dependencies to wrangle into place. There…

> It takes me over a day to get an Express application up and running. I feel so much better after seeing this sentiment here. I've tried to dip my toe into the node.js world repeatedly only to feel like I'm trudging through setup for hours. Of course I may have incorrect memories of how difficult/easy it was to set up my first rails app however long ago.

I should also add it "only" takes me a day because I can crib from a half dozen other Express projects I've created in the past and cherry-pick cut-and-paste parts that I like.

As one example my web app Gulpfile has evolved significantly from the first iteration and it would take multiple days to recreate all of that from scratch.

The Rails Asset Pipeline might be obnoxiously rigid, but at least it works without having to tear your hair out.

Re: DHH answers: What makes Rails a framework worth learning in 2017?

#50

Post by deedubaya »

bobbytherobot wrote: post #38

Maybe Rails has changed from when I last used it five years ago, but I dealt with many of the issues DHH makes against other technology. > That people spent hours, if not days, just setting up the skeletons. The basic build configurations. I spent hours everyday getting the asset pipeline to work, or it would break again, meaning I would have to fix it again. > The vast majority of activity today is for yet another o…

> I spent hours everyday getting the asset pipeline to work, or it would break again, meaning I would have to fix it again.

I used to have this problem too -- more so in the early days of asset pipeline. Mostly when trying to use some client side framework. Rails is working on (or maybe already available, I'm not sure) yarn/webpack support.

> Every week the developers want to switch out some module for another module within Rails because it was the hot new thing.

Replacing the batteries which are included can be painful at times. If you want to use the new hotness in Rails, it comes at a price of extra work getting it working... but it only seems painful when comparing to the included batteries -- they just work. Support for different test frameworks, orms, templating languages are pretty good anymore though and are easier to swap out.

You'll definitely have a better experience with Rails if you forego the desire to run the latest and greatest and just use what Rails already has.

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