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

Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

ostif.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 171 posts

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#41

Post by demosthanos »

kybishop wrote: post #39
demosthanos wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is actually designed from the ground up for web dev (being based on the Erlang VM) Nit: this makes it sounds like the BEAM was designed for web dev, which it was not. Erlang came out of Ericsson and was built for telecoms (OTP stands for Open Telecom Platform), which is where its unique set of trade-offs comes from. Many of those trade-offs make a ton of sense for web but that's not because it was designed for web,…

Very true it is actually designed for telecoms, but like you mentioned the distinction is so small it's not really even a stretch to say it is purpose built with at least the general architecture of web in mind.

In the grand scheme of things, if we're considering everything from web to bridge building, yeah, the distinction is small. But within the world of software engineering specifically it's not all that small and it's worth being precise when we're talking about it.

Whatsapp and telecoms have a lot in common, so no one questions that they benefited a ton from the BEAM.

Airbnb, though? The main similarity is that they both send large quantities of signal over wires.

Again, none of this is to stop you from liking the BEAM, but when we're talking about professional software engineering it pays to be explicit about what the design constraints were for the products that you're using so that you can make sure that your own design constraints are not in conflict with theirs.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#42

Post by monooso »

neya wrote: post #21
ukprogrammer wrote: post #12

The productivity of Rails for B2B 'CRUD' software is unmatched. Surprised to not see more newer startups make use of it!

I was a Rails consultant for about 7 years. Then, I switched to Phoenix - really out of just curiosity. Since then, I've never looked back. If you never believed in "Simple is better" philosophy, you will after using Phoenix. The development time is shorter, the bugs are far less since you catch them at compile time and the development experience is unmatched. Oh, and did I mention performance? You can get insane per…

I wouldn't describe LiveView as simple, necessarily. It makes for a great demo, but in my experience it complicates simple things in lots of subtle—and occasionally pernicious—ways.

Whilst you can use Phoenix without LiveView, this is becoming increasingly difficult as the Phoenix developers have clearly decided that LiveView is The Way.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#43

Post by dzonga »

and yet people wanna shit at frameworks.!! by choosing something like Rails or another major popular web framework -- you have already mitigated a lot of security vulnerabilities that affect the industry. & no next.js is not a proper web framework. JS doesn't have the equivalent to rails.

The web frameworks we're talking are Rails, Django, Laravel & Spring.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#44

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

ukprogrammer wrote: post #12

The productivity of Rails for B2B 'CRUD' software is unmatched. Surprised to not see more newer startups make use of it!

With so many generative AI tools out there, picking more obscure or niche languages is a detractor because the AI models won't have as much depth of training to pull from when you ask it to do things.

Also, technology choices for B2B web apps is rarely going to be a sole factor in determining success or failure of any business. As much as this community likes to compare performance metrics, benchmarks, frameworks and everyone has personal tastes on what is "good", all of those discussions are mostly irrelevant. Picking something the team is comfortable with and has depth of knowledge in is a good practice.

So just pick Rails and move on with solving business problems :)

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#45

Post by runjake »

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #44
ukprogrammer wrote: post #12

The productivity of Rails for B2B 'CRUD' software is unmatched. Surprised to not see more newer startups make use of it!

With so many generative AI tools out there, picking more obscure or niche languages is a detractor because the AI models won't have as much depth of training to pull from when you ask it to do things. Also, technology choices for B2B web apps is rarely going to be a sole factor in determining success or failure of any business. As much as this community likes to compare performance metrics, benchmarks, frameworks and…

I do some Rails work and I’ve found that Ruby and Rails are one of generative AIs weaker languages. I usually get pretty shoddy output[1].

I generally don’t use AI during Rails stuff, other than as a hint for a Google search or a docs lookup.

Are you having a different experience?

1. Shoddy output with Ruby and Rails knowledge. In general, I would consider myself pretty advanced with “prompt engineering”.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#46

Post by bee_rider »

kybishop wrote: post #18
ukprogrammer wrote: post #12

The productivity of Rails for B2B 'CRUD' software is unmatched. Surprised to not see more newer startups make use of it!

After programming with elixir and phoenix for a few years (with many prior years of rails experience) I have a hard time seeing why one would choose rails. Elixir is more performant, has compiler safety guarantees that are only getting better as types are introduced, is actually designed from the ground up for web dev (being based on the Erlang VM), and... it's just way more fun (subjective I know). Elixir is what I…

Fortran nowadays is fairly ergonomic and modern.

In terms of successors there’s maybe Julia, or otherwise you’d have to use Python or Matlab/Octave, with all that going to a scripting language entails. In any case it doesn’t really feel like there’s been a replacement.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#47

Post by throwawaymaths »

Shank wrote: post #19
kybishop wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After programming with elixir and phoenix for a few years (with many prior years of rails experience) I have a hard time seeing why one would choose rails. Elixir is more performant, has compiler safety guarantees that are only getting better as types are introduced, is actually designed from the ground up for web dev (being based on the Erlang VM), and... it's just way more fun (subjective I know). Elixir is what I…

> I have a hard time seeing why one would choose rails I like Ruby, and I feel it has significantly prettier syntax, to me, than Elixir. So that’s a big reason why I also like rails.

It's a matter of taste, but i found Ruby syntax to be annoyingly inconsistent, and do |..| ... end being something that isn't quite a lambda a huge source of confusion.

also activerecord doing "trust me bro" things behind the scenes (like pluralization) drove me up the wall.

to be fair ecto does a small bit of this too, but at least it doesn't change spellings (so you can global search an identifier).

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#48

Post by ostif-derek »

Hey there everyone!

Some friends just notified us that this is trending.

Let me know if you have any questions/comments/feedback about the work! It was a great project, I wish we had more budget so that we could spend some time with ruzzy and the C extensions as there's probably some things to be unearthed there with ASAN and UBSAN.

As for the comments on Spring/Elixir/Django/Phoenix, they're on our wish list every year but we're always limited by funding. It's about what the communities, foundations, and agencies can and will support. We are always working toward getting larger grants where we can work fully independently on whatever we want, but so far that hasn't materialized.

We'll keep trying!

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#49

Post by Vegenoid »

kybishop wrote: post #37
bhaak wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rails might be 90% better for webdev than the rest while Elixir might be 95% better. Talk about diminishing returns. Add in problems finding developers skilled in Elixir and Phoenix and the small available libraries. Of course, you also have that to some degree in Rails but it is much less pronounced.

> Add in problems finding developers skilled in Elixir and Phoenix and the small available libraries. Is this actually a problem you see? I'm going on 15 years in the industry and haven't seen any issues training people up on a new language in just a couple months. If you need an expert in some library or language to make meaningful business progress I feel like that says more about whatever tool or language you're u…

I feel like the sentiment of “we can train a competent dev in our language and stack” has given way to “we want a dev with proven experience in our language/stack” over the last few years. I suspect this has something to do with more non-technical staff being put in between candidates and the engineers they’ll be working with during the hiring process. These non-technical staff rely on “x years of experience in thing” to know if a person might be competent at that thing.

I think that this is one of the reasons networking is becoming more and more important, because it lets a candidate demonstrate their generally-applicable development skills to a fellow engineer who is capable of making qualitative engineering judgements.

Re: Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

#50

Post by runjake »

dzonga wrote: post #43

and yet people wanna shit at frameworks.!! by choosing something like Rails or another major popular web framework -- you have already mitigated a lot of security vulnerabilities that affect the industry. & no next.js is not a proper web framework. JS doesn't have the equivalent to rails. The web frameworks we're talking are Rails, Django, Laravel & Spring.

“Equivalent to Rails” is a nebulous term, but given your examples, I’d offer these as JS equivalents of Rails:

- SvelteKit

- RedwoodJS

- Wasp

There are more options but I think they’d cause more “well, actually” comments than I could bear. :-)

Post reply on HN