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Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

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Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#61

Post by inferiorhuman »

josevalim wrote: post #59
inferiorhuman wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW the last time I tried to use Elixir with escript was with 1.3. The parts that make Elixir interesting for web apps aren't necessarily things you'd be leveraging in scripts and so, unfortunately, instead of waiting around for Elixir to do the things I was interested in I've moved on. There just aren't any killer features in Elixir that would revisit it. If I need lightweight concurrency primitives there's go. If…

> FWIW the last time I tried to use Elixir with escript was with 1.3. Interesting, escripts should have worked by then. I assume this was quite some time ago, so you don't have it around anymore, but if you do recall what went wrong I would love to take a look at it. But just to put things in perspective, v1.3 is almost three years old and things have generally evolved since. > There just aren't any killer features i…

But just to put things in perspective, v1.3 is almost three years old and things have generally evolved since.

But who wants to sit idly and wait for three years for a language to evolve (and regress)? At what point does saying "deployments have been broken with no fix or root cause in sight, let's just sit tight and hope for the best" sound ridiculous?

Were the alternatives to Elixir mediocre I'd consider revisiting it. Were I to see an interesting opening at an Elixir shop, I'd consider it. Would I ever stake my reputation on suggesting Elixir for a new project in a professional environment? Absolutely, 100% no.

Well, sometimes the killer feature is having all of that in the same package: immutability, concurrent primitives, scripts, etc.

I get all of that with rust and I'm not tied to Linux or a petulant maintainer. vOv

I'd be careful about touting performance versus a compiled language like Rust though. Going from Phoenix to Rocket I saw a pretty dramatic speedup in the time it took to serve requests even on my simplest web app (an image gallery). Phoenix wasn't slow, but Rocket was consistently faster.

Edit: OK async on rust is still a shit show, but hey nothing's perfect, right?

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#62

Post by josevalim »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #61
josevalim wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FWIW the last time I tried to use Elixir with escript was with 1.3. Interesting, escripts should have worked by then. I assume this was quite some time ago, so you don't have it around anymore, but if you do recall what went wrong I would love to take a look at it. But just to put things in perspective, v1.3 is almost three years old and things have generally evolved since. > There just aren't any killer features i…

But just to put things in perspective, v1.3 is almost three years old and things have generally evolved since. But who wants to sit idly and wait for three years for a language to evolve (and regress)? At what point does saying "deployments have been broken with no fix or root cause in sight, let's just sit tight and hope for the best" sound ridiculous? Were the alternatives to Elixir mediocre I'd consider revisiting…

> But who wants to sit idly and wait for three years for a language to evolve?

That's not what I meant at all.

Look, I am not trying to invalidate your experience. Nor I am implying you should wait 3 years for things to get fixed. Nor I am saying that Elixir is better than Rust.

I just want to point out that, for someone starting with or using Elixir today, their experience may be different because 3 years is a lot for a language and ecosystem where v1.0 was only 5.5 years ago. Deployment involves many concerns and even if some particular scenarios have not evolved accordingly, you can be sure others have. The same applies to Rust and other languages, they are improving all the time.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#63

Post by inferiorhuman »

josevalim wrote: post #62
inferiorhuman wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But just to put things in perspective, v1.3 is almost three years old and things have generally evolved since. But who wants to sit idly and wait for three years for a language to evolve (and regress)? At what point does saying "deployments have been broken with no fix or root cause in sight, let's just sit tight and hope for the best" sound ridiculous? Were the alternatives to Elixir mediocre I'd consider revisiting…

> But who wants to sit idly and wait for three years for a language to evolve? That's not what I meant at all. Look, I am not trying to invalidate your experience. Nor I am implying you should wait 3 years for things to get fixed. Nor I am saying that Elixir is better than Rust. I just want to point out that, for someone starting with or using Elixir today, their experience may be different because 3 years is a lot f…

I just want to point out that, for someone starting with or using Elixir today, their experience may be different because 3 years is a lot for a language and ecosystem where v1.0 was only 5.5 years ago.

Distillery was (is?) broken less than a year ago. Ending up in a situation where such a key component (deployments) is developed and understood by only one person for such a long period of time speaks very poorly to the oversight and development process of Elixir. Beyond that it creates a distrust that Elixir will continue to work or prioritized appropriately — deployments worked on BSD for some period of time.

The last message I got from Github from BSD user commenting about distillery not working was in February 2019. After that it devolved into "here's how you get distillery working in Docker." That's the kind of low quality engagement I walked away from, and that's the reason I continue to recommend against Elixir or Phoenix for new projects.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#64

Post by MagicPropmaker »

Is it even possible? Or do you basically have to relearn what you missed in Computer Science over the last 6 years.

It reminds me of what Dijkstra said about people raised on BASIC in the 70s:

> It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#65

Post by pmarreck »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #60
josevalim wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If those are your concerns, then the fact we are adding releases to Elixir core in the upcoming version should solve most of them. The single point of failure is gone. The code is now maintained by the Elixir Core Team and it should garner more general attention from the community. The amount and complexity of scripts have been reduced drastically and they are statically verified to run on `sh` (no bash). As with eve…

If those are your concerns, then the fact we are adding releases to Elixir core in the upcoming version should solve most of them. I've articulated my experience in my previous reply to you, but I'll pose this response: that it's taken so long for Elixir to come up with a manageable deployment story makes it seem like deployments are an afterthought with Elixir. If things are better now that's great, but as an ops gu…

The Elixir tooling is fantastic, not sure where you pulled that one out from. IDE's are unnecessary cruft to the point that I'd call it a language-design smell if you really felt compelled to use one; VSCode is great. Deployments are trivial if you use Gigalixir (which has a free tier) and will be easier in the general case going forward.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#66

Post by pmarreck »

MagicPropmaker wrote: post #64

Is it even possible? Or do you basically have to relearn what you missed in Computer Science over the last 6 years. It reminds me of what Dijkstra said about people raised on BASIC in the 70s: > It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

My progression was BASIC > Pascal > (insert a bunch of procedural/OO langs and scripting langs)> .NET > Ruby > coding Ruby in a FP style > Elixir.

So basically procedural > OO > functional.

I will say the hardest transitions (where "hard" is still less hard than, say, understanding everything about how a SQL join works) were from .NET to Ruby (and even THAT transition was mostly hard because I was going from "Microsoft ecosystem" to "open-source ecosystem" without having Java on my resume), and from Ruby to Elixir (syntactically similar, semantically night-and-day). But clearly it's possible... and I'm a Dijkstra fan!

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#67

Post by veidr »

freehunter wrote: post #2

I’ve seen a number of people move from Rails to Rust... is that really a common move? Seems like they’re very different and designed for very different things. Are people commonly building web applications in Rust? I know it’s possible but C++ has web frameworks too and that seems like a more apt comparison. I guess I’m just baffled by the number of people on here that I see pointing to Rust as the next project they…

I did not read TFA, but I think the reason people go from Ruby on Rails to Rust is that various people they trust went that route.

For instance, Yehuda Katz and Steve Klabnik were both extremely helpful and widely admired figures in the Ruby/Rails community. Then they both joined the Rust core team.

That alone is enough to attract the interest of a lot of rails people I think, by giving Rust relatively huge exposure among Ruby people.

Then you have the fact that (probably due to the above) Rust became a common choice for outsourcing performance-critical parts of Rails apps.

Once you start doing that, it’s kind of natural to start thinking hmmm what if I wasn’t even doing Rails..

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#68

Post by learc83 »

pjmlp wrote: post #53
learc83 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>However every time I've looked at crystal I've stopped because there's no windows version. I have to have a gaming PC and I only use editors and languages that work on windows mac and linux so I don't hamstring myself or anyone I'm working with. I have a gaming PC too and I run my editor and browser etc... in windows, but I have a Linux server where the software I'm developing actually lives and runs (if it's someth…

Some of us do deploy Web applications on Windows.

In which case developing on Windows makes perfect sense.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#69

Post by dleslie »

learc83 wrote: post #12
dleslie wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps critically, it lacks an official Windows distribution and support.

Is anyone deploying anything other than .NET on windows for webdev though?

As a game developer who sometimes uses Ruby, Crystal is appealing but a non starter.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#70

Post by mooreds »

BilalBudhani wrote: post #41

I believe Sean's decision of moving to Rust has very little to do with Ruby/Rails. I think all of us have a point where we just simply want to move on to new things in life. I really appreciate all the contributions done by Sean in Ruby On Rails and wish him all the best.

Sounds like some philosophical differences too.

I hope he can make a living doing open source.

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