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Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

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Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#71

Post by jonathankoren »

raarts wrote: post #37
EpicEng wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Hope that clarifies things No, not really, and I don't think I assumed that at all. I think it is objectively true that debating the merits of e.g. Python v Ruby for years on end is an utter waste of time. This is not engineering, it's vanity. I can get behind the occasional spirited debate. Of course there are pros and cons to every tool, and we should know what those are, but at the end of the day that's all they…

I think it 's because of the number of young/unexperienced developers in the field. Those are the ones spending (wasting) a lot of time debating the relative merits of frameworks, languages, editors. More experienced people don't care as much.

>I think it 's because of the number of young/unexperienced developers in the field.

I honestly think this is it. Webdev has an inordinate amount of "let's rewrite it... again!" But the thing that really cinched the webdev community isn't ready for primetime was the whole left-pad debacle. Auto updating of dependencies is bush league bullshit, and the whole rotten edifice came predictably crashing down because of it.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#72

Post by busterarm »

singlow wrote: post #47
EpicEng wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What is the average number of hours you spend on a given project? That's a fair point; my project plans are usually measured in years, not hours. Of course there is ongoing maintenance, but that's not where I spend most of my time. I didn't mean to imply that tools aren't important, or that we shouldn't care. We absolutely should care, and I do as well. The difference is that I don't feel the need to spend copious a…

Part of the reason it matters more to web developers is that often our clients and employers do care what we use and if we love a particular tool it needs widespread adoption to be able to use it on real work. I have potential clients asking constantly if I can build their project with WordPress or Rails or Drupal or Symphony or whatever else they think is the best. It would be much better if they just came and asked…

WordPress is a valid question/option for them if they have a large amount of content they have to add using their marketing staff instead of more expensive developer consultants.

It also is if they don't have a years-long working relationship with you, because who is going to maintain all of this when you're gone? At least if they have to dump your work and build a new theme, they don't have to worry about figuring out a whole new data model (most of the time).

WordPress done the right way uses plugins sparingly to get the job done, outside of obvious ones like Advanced Custom Fields Pro and Post 2 Post Links.

WP isn't bad per-se, it's just the majority of people who work on it (and let's be honest, who built it) are/were rank amateurs.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#73

Post by bdcravens »

These days, I'm finding a lot of joy in taking parts of a Rails app that feel clunky (meaning they usually aren't Basecamp-like, and I find myself using a lot of magic and config to make it fit a Rails-shaped hole), extracting it out as a stand-alone Sinatra app that uses Sequel instead of ActiveRecord, gemifying it, and then pulling it back into the parent monolith as an engine.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#74

Post by creshal »

ben_jones wrote: post #57
educar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is just wrong - almost 3/4 of Google's web apps depend on Angular from what I have heard from multiple Googlers. If a rare instance where an Angular release failure occurs, it shuts down Google's development process dramatically & costs millions in productivity. So you were quick to call somebody wrong based on complete heresay? Do you have any conclusive proof that they use it? Gmail? Analytics?

Literally 5 seconds of Googling [1]. Turns out the app that allows Google's Ad customers (i.e. their main source of revenue) to use the Google platform is written in angular. It's also one of the oldest and largest Angular apps in existence. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62RvRQuMVyg

I was going to say "If it's not ad or search, Google will have no trouble killing it off", but this makes it a little bit business critical to Google.

I'd only start worrying if they move that away from Angular.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#75

Post by infinii »

EpicEng wrote: post #36
themgt wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the average number of hours you spend on a given project? Honestly I think part of the reliance and importance placed on frameworks is that a lot of web dev (especially contract/freelance work) is still relatively small projects, stuff between 10-100 hours of work. So you're almost never spending 99% of your time solving unsolved, hard problems. You're building custom solutions to relatively common but specia…

>What is the average number of hours you spend on a given project? That's a fair point; my project plans are usually measured in years, not hours. Of course there is ongoing maintenance, but that's not where I spend most of my time. I didn't mean to imply that tools aren't important, or that we shouldn't care. We absolutely should care, and I do as well. The difference is that I don't feel the need to spend copious a…

Your project plan is measured in years?

All the orange crops just froze over from the chills running down the backs of all the Agile\Lean practitioners.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#76

Post by busterarm »

tariqali34 wrote: post #2

> Experienced people often forget the learning curve when they were themselves beginners, and at that time Rails was so attractive, so sexy. Remember that feeling? Of accomplishment in the face of the knowledge that some nice witch left super useful black magic behind? As one of those beginner programmers who had graduated from a development bootcamp, I fell in love with Sinatra much more than I did with Rails. Part…

As someone who didn't love Rails until I learned it "the right way", I'd argue that you have to thoroughly understand SQL joins and ActiveRecord before you can even attempt to architect a rails project.

Very few bootcamps get this right, I feel, but a few do.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#77

Post by bdcravens »

busterarm wrote: post #61
bascule wrote: post #27

I've been using Rails for a decade now, across many jobs, and one thing I've experienced fairly consistently is the worst Ruby web apps I have ever dealt with are the ones that weren't written in Rails. I've both seen and spent a lot of time rewriting overgrown Sinatra monstrosities with assorted non-AR ORMs. These apps were generally riddled with XSS since they didn't handle escaping correctly, often had unmaintaina…

I used Sequel once on a major project and as nice as it was, there was major pain. Pain I wouldn't have had with ActiveRecord. I seriously would have gotten the job done in half the time, with less problems had I just used Rails...and I've written my own ORMs before - I have somewhat of a clue.

I'm having the opposite experience, but I think that's because I'm working on a legacy database that really doesn't follow conventions. Even when overriding defaults in AR, I still found myself trying to hammer what I was doing into a AR-shaped block, whereas Sequel feels like it lets me craft a resultset as I desire regardless of what I'm starting with. But like I said, it's a legacy database and it was originally driving an app where writing raw SQL was the SOP, some of which really leans of higher-level SQL engine features for function and performance.

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#78

Post by vonklaus »

reitanqild wrote: post #70
vonklaus wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i actually have been interested in Java because apache has open sourced what seems to be the best collection of resources on the internet and they are almost entirely written in java for the java ecosystem. I also think I would learn a massive amount. I also am strongly considering Java and less strongly C. What are your thoughts on Java in terms of: * How much it would teach me about programming/software design, e.g…

1. Java has had huge amounts of open source code for years. (Case in point: course provider sales representative telling my colleague somewhat annoyed that Java people are the worst because "they are used to get everything for free.) 2. Im going to read that as "... 1 month after finishing studies". I will recommend starting somewhere where you get good colleagues. When I finished school I was sure I could never work…

I mean, could I teach myself Java and build something interesting in a month. Sounds like a no?

Re: Rails has won: The Elephant in the Room

#80

Post by holografix »

Ruby was the number 1 reason why about 6 years ago, fresh out of uni with a Java/C background, I chose to learn Python and Django.

Ruby seemed rather useless outside of Rails and I really, really liked what I saw in the Zen of Python.

Ie. less magic, explicit > implicit. Etc.

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