Rails wasn't even the best choice when it appeared.
After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply
91–100 of 219 posts
Re: After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply
#92The thing is in many cases you had to make a choice between performance and productivity. With
things like Elixir/Phoenix you don't really have to make that choice. Maturity argument again is moot as you are building on top of Erlang/BEAM that's very mature and has very good tooling. For people coming from Ruby the syntax also makes transitioning less of a pain.
Re: After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply
#93There is, perhaps, a law, such that any project with a strong tendency to pile up more crap instead of reducing it to "just right, when nothing else could be removed" (a-la 9P2000 protocol, and few foundation libs of Plan9) will end up in a J2EE-like pile of collective stupidity.
At least, everything in nature tends to get reduced to a local optimum by a straightforward optimization process of trial and error. There is no way to make a reliable and efficient complex system by piling up more and more crap.
And, funny enough, JavaScript will be even worse - it already makes J2EE look not that bad.)
Re: After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hear horror stories like this, and I have one of my own. 1. Absolutely no tests of any kind 2. Over 100 gem dependencies Upgrade from 3.2.x to 4.2.x took one developer (me) three weeks of work. I don't know if that's a lot or not, given the major version upgrade and all of the gems (which were a huge pain). I've not had any problems in production reported via Honeybadger or by end users, so I think the upgrade was…
A huge upgrade on code with no tests and a bunch of magical dependencies? The problem wasn't Rails there.
There's an argument to be made that Rails, by not actually enforcing conventions like TDD, gives an amateur/impatient developer a very high calibre footgun.
Unfortunately, of course, that gun doesn't usually go off until it's handed to someone else.
Re: After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply
#95The problem I feel with Ruby and RoR apps is that people bang gems together without knowing how those gems do what they promise to do, what those gems depend upon, what those gems monkey patch, what they change.
Further down the road, maintenance drowns you.
I've rallied against this mindset before, e.g. regards security http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/43394068341/rubys...
I find large Python apps fairly unmaintainable too, but to a much lesser degree.
Re: After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply
#96Recently I upgraded a project from Rails 3.2.x to 4.0.x... 4.0.x -> 4.1.x... 4.1.x -> 4.2.x It was, and still is, a nightmare. Technically speaking Rails itself upgraded in a reasonably straight-forward way, just follow the documentation (well and a few blog posts here and there for the things missed in the official docs). But all the additional Gems, and dependencies of those Gems (and so on) made the process excruc…
The only library I've felt absolutely safe doing upgrades with is Wicket, because it makes extensive use of the type system to ensure that you only use it in supported ways: many classes are final, and even those that aren't have a lot of final methods. It can be frustrating to have to copy-paste a Wicket class when you want similar behaviour, but it works beautifully.
Re: After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply
#97At the moment, the alternatives mentioned to Rails aren't actually alternatives. You are still going to make major trade offs in productivity compared to Rails...
Unless he's talking about Elixir and Phoenix, which IMHO is the future of web development.
Re: After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting comment; I believe if you are going to implicate Cold Fusion, you also need to rope in PHP. My first exposure to web programming was HTMLScript at my university in the mid 90s (now called MivaScript and is the language used to build the MivaMerchant product). Soon after, I switched to PHP 3, but I found that I preferred Miva. I have not touched Miva in years after spending some time as a freelancer in the…
This isn't really the case. There are modern web frameworks for PHP -- https://laravel.com/ is the best example
Also PHP still powers much of the web and has taken a step forward with PHP 7 which seems to run a good bit faster than Ruby and the like.
Re: After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply
#99I've come to the conclusion that those who defend weak/dynamic type systems and other unsafe toolchains simply buy into the fallacy of the uber-developer: the belief that while other, lesser developers need static typing and analysis, I'm so superior that I will never introduce those class of bugs, ever.
I like Elixir quite a bit, and it doesn't have a strong type system. The pattern matching removes a lot of the pain of weak types.
Re: After reading “Rails is yesterday’s software”, I need to reply
#100As more of the computational elements of UIs shift from server-side HTML to client-side Javascript, server-side frameworks like Rails, Django, PHP, etc. become less relevant.
Fast forwarding, many apps are (or will be) big JS blobs using APIs/microservices back to the server. In that version of the future, frameworks like Rails can get in the way more than they help.