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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

#71

Post by AlchemistCamp »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #34
cocochanel wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, they are for completely different purposes. I have the feeling that a lot of people (particularly the bloggers/more vocal types) jump into newer languages for no other reason than to position themselves as experts in said language/stack, right when it's getting more popular. I've seen this happen with Ruby/Rails, JavaScript/Node, and now Rust. In this case, it would have made a lot more sense to move to some…

I cut my teeth on Ruby and Rails, I've screwed around with Phoenix, and I'm currently infatuated with Rust. Earlier on I thought that, yeah, Rust is a great replacement for C and not something want to write a web app in. So, sure, I've got a bunch of little doodads written in Rust (mostly CLI tools). Now? The fluff I've written in Elixir is getting ported to Rust. The Rust tooling and community are just that good. I'…

This is quite a coincidence as deployment was exactly what I covered in my last YT video. I hear the complaint about deployment a lot, but it really doesn't make sense to me.

If you run mix in production, then it's just like running Rails or Node. You don't get certain features like hot upgrades in production while keeping what's in memory on the server, but you don't get that from Rails/Node/PHP/Python either.

If you want those BEAM releases, then you have to use the Elixir (or Erlang) tools for them. I also encountered a great deal of frustration when working from a different OS, but no more than I did when building Rails apps several years ago.

Now I generally, build with Gitlab CI/CD and deploy from that Gitlab container to my server with Distillery and Edeliver. It lets me use the standard CI/CD tools and have stateful upgrades. I am running Ubuntu on the server, though:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mm44ADU3kc

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#72

Post by bryanlarsen »

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.

OTOH, one of the best ways to learn something is try to use it on a language that doesn't support it. Back when I was a kid, I tried translating a Pascal quicksort from a textbook into BASIC. Those old BASIC's didn't support re-entrant functions, so I ended up having to implement my own stack. I didn't understand re-entrancy and recursion before that exercise; but certainly did afterwards! A similar later experience with a game engine in assembly language taught me a lot about object orientated designs.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#73

Post by ajmurmann »

zik wrote: post #21
ajmurmann wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ruby has developer happiness as one of its main goals. Go on the other hand seems to have a lot of narratives around keeping the language small even if it's inconvenient. Add to that that Rust with Cargo has a package manager that will fell just like home to Ruby devs, whereas Go brought package managing back to the dark ages. => All this makes it hard to get excited about Go. Rust on the other hand comes with a bunc…

I don't think the "lot of narratives" you're talking about actually exist. I've never heard anyone from the Go camp say that they want to make the language "small even if it's inconvenient". From a language design point of view I think they're trying to make it small to maximise convenience. Yes, it's a different philosophy to "kitchen sink" languages but that doesn't make it wrong. In fact it's considered a gold sta…

I don't disagree that making the language small is a great goal and makes the language better. I just think that such a language will not appeal to everyone who enjoyed a large language full of syntactic sugar like Ruby. In fact I very much agree with Go's design goals and see lots of problems with Rust's design choices, at least when considering it for "mondain" work like web dev. However, I cannot get myself excited about Go at all, while I am very excited about Rust. I think it's that Rust, especially coming from Ruby, has interesting new concepts that lead to many rewarding learnings where you change how you reason about some things. When I read about Go, there are no surprises, everything immediately makes sense. All of this is good. It's also boring (in a good way). If I somehow got forced to use one of these languages for a new startup, I'd go with Go. If I had to pick one for playing around with on the weekend, I'd definitely go with Rust.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#74

Post by erikpukinskis »

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…

Both the Ruby and Rust communities are drawn to a "Everything In Its Right Place" mentality.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#75

Post by pjmlp »

learc83 wrote: post #33
pault wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I'm saying. It's not uncommon for companies to have AWS linux infrastructure for deployment but give everyone windows laptops for development. Don't ask me, ask the IT department.

Are they running Linux VMs? Everywhere I've worked, I'm one of the few who's not on a Mac, so I'm not familiar with companies like this.

Very typical on enterprises doing Java development.

It doesn't matter where the JVM is running.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#76

Post by kbenson »

cocochanel wrote: post #10
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…

Correct, they are for completely different purposes. I have the feeling that a lot of people (particularly the bloggers/more vocal types) jump into newer languages for no other reason than to position themselves as experts in said language/stack, right when it's getting more popular. I've seen this happen with Ruby/Rails, JavaScript/Node, and now Rust. In this case, it would have made a lot more sense to move to some…

> In this case, it would have made a lot more sense to move to something like Elixir/Phoenix.

In this case it's about someone involved in both languages already moving from being primarily (or identifying as) a Rails committer to a Rust ecosystem committer (for which he's already written a few very popular modules over the past couple years). This isn't the usual "I tried some new language and I like it" blog post, so I'm not sure your assessment holds true, for this case at least.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#77

Post by kbenson »

pjmlp wrote: post #38

> The problem is that working on MIT/Apache licensed software doesn’t exactly help pay the bills. That’s why I’m asking for your help. I’ve spent the last 5 years having a single company sponsor my open source work. This time I’m going to try something different. Right now my goal is to get a handful of medium sized grants from larger companies to support my work on crates.io. If you work for a company that might be…

Honestly, my initial thought when reading the article was whether anyone is using Patreon for helping them focus on open source projects, or if there's a popular competitor for that. Patreon seems to have all the controls to handle this well though. I would happily give a buck or two to someone monthly, and an additional few dollars per release capped at once a month or quarter (and Patreon supports both those, but I'm not sure it supports them at the same time). Although something that worked at the project and/or individual+project level might be better in this case.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#78

Post by kbenson »

misterdoubt wrote: post #58
gigatexal wrote: post #5

I would have thought rails to golang so I too am surprised. I wish I had millions and could be a patron saint of sorts for people like the author. Open source funding is so broken as the companies that build upon the vast open source and often free software don’t do much in the way of donating or otherwise supporting the companies or individuals behind the projects.

The article seems to disagree with your point about open source funding: > Right now my goal is to get a handful of medium sized grants from larger companies to support my work on crates.io. If you work for a company that might be interested in helping sponsor me, please reach out. If that's a financially viable proposition, that speaks well of large companies supporting individuals on open source projects, no?

I think that particular type of patronage is fairly uncommon, but popular projects might have a couple people like that each. That's still a very low number if I'm correct. I know sometimes there are foundations for languages that aggregate donations and fund grants to do specific work (e.g. part of the The Perl Foundation's function, I believe).

I think the majority of companies that give back do so through developer time and effort. If there's a non-profit to push money through to fund work, they at least get to write it off easily, so whether a language has one like the one I referenced above might greatly affect whether there are dedicated people working on the language specifically or not.

Does anyone know if the "Rust organization" he references is meant to refer to Rust as a whole, or is a specific non-profit with a goal of funding Rust advancement? I'm not finding anything specific. Mozilla probably isn't equivalent, as I imagine only a fraction of anything donated to them could be expected to go directly towards Rust.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#79

Post by steveklabnik »

kbenson wrote: post #78
misterdoubt wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article seems to disagree with your point about open source funding: > Right now my goal is to get a handful of medium sized grants from larger companies to support my work on crates.io. If you work for a company that might be interested in helping sponsor me, please reach out. If that's a financially viable proposition, that speaks well of large companies supporting individuals on open source projects, no?

I think that particular type of patronage is fairly uncommon, but popular projects might have a couple people like that each. That's still a very low number if I'm correct. I know sometimes there are foundations for languages that aggregate donations and fund grants to do specific work (e.g. part of the The Perl Foundation's function, I believe). I think the majority of companies that give back do so through develope…

There is no legal entity, he just means the contributors group. The GitHub organization.

We may eventually start a foundation, but that’s a huge “may”.

Re: Moving on from Rails and What’s Next

#80

Post by bitbang »

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…

The one reason that might make sense is if the objective is to write webapps using webassembly. Rust can compile to webassembly. But that seems more like it would displace something like React or other frontend frameworks rather than Rails. Elixir/Phoenix seems like a much more logical progression from Rails.
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