Ruby on Rails Audit Complete

> 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, it's because there's overlap between the fields.

One way to see the difference between telecoms and web is to ask yourself when was the last time that you were working on a project with an availability SLA of 9 nines (1/3 of a second of downtime per year) or even 6 nines (32s per year). Some web dev has that, but most doesn't come close, and if that's not you then Erlang wasn't built for you (though you may still find you like it for other reasons!).

I switched fully to elixir close to a decade ago now and library availability is still lagging. For pretty much any company I can be pretty sure there will be JS/Ruby/Python/C#/Java integrations/libraries and occasionally you'll find one for elixir maintained by someone that stopped responding to github issues 3 years ago.

It's definitely better but I can definitely see why you'd still choose rails these days.

I have a very extensive experience with both Ruby on Rails and Elixir/Phoenix. Also ended up building large full-stack apps on either framework.

In the beginning when Ruby on Rails said hello to me, I instantly fell in love with it and the simplicity and the natural semantics that flow with it. It was absurdly easy to write new features and ship them to production. As the codebase grew and the team grew we started running into situations where APIs broke, or to trace the workflow of things in terms of finding where methods came from, finding parent modules of modules, and finding their parents, configuration, and I started to note a general lack of IDE autocomplete and type-safety.

Then after a few years I jumped ship to Elixir and if felt like a breath of clean air when I had to learn FP. Everything was simple enough to understand. Performance knocks Elixir, Node, Python and any other interpreted stack out of the water. The Phoenix framework was, and is said to be thoughtfully designed and although there was no IDE support, we still had Elixir LS which was great enough to provide realtime guidance, linting and type safety during compile time. I was able to ship a very large app into production and it was bulletproof. The problem with Elixir was our other engineers struggled to shift away from Node, or any other stacks they already knew. They found the entire FP world to be weird. Hell, I found it weird too at times. Simple mutations of maps and arrays, that would be trivial in Ruby ended up being so complex in Elixir. In the end it felt like my team was not on the same page. I guess Elixir would be great if you ran a 3-person team or something, but since we were not, we got back to Ruby. In today's world though, I am largely looking at Go, for a backend system. IDE support is up there with Java, and the ecosystem is old and mature enough to find any package that you look for. Performance is C-like and learning curve is lean.

Just my 2c with all these platforms.

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.

> 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.

As someone who has used elixir for startups and loves it, the benefit of Rails for a startup is that it's easier to pick up. html/live projects can create more confusing layouts, which can make it harder to learn if you're trying to get something running. Rails is a great framework to use if you're primary product is not a website, but you need a website.

Elixir is a great language, but it lacks a framework as polished and full-featured as Rails. Phoenix could have been far more popular if it had something like Active Record.

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.

Yes, love it. Rewritten large parts of my stack in it (editor, shell, font renderer, terminal, window manager, file manager)

I started from a background of heavy C++ use, including a lot of template metaprogramming. Convincing me to even give Ruby a chance took a lot, but once I'd tried it I abandoned C++ pretty much immediately, and don't miss it.

yes, I have used a lot of languages, both static and dynamic, and ruby is one of the ones I love. maintaining large code bases is certainly not its forte, but in terms of expressing what you want in code it is like a tool that fits really well into my hand.

I had a good background in C++ programming before switching to ruby. At first, I was terrified of the lack of strict typing, but after using it for a while, I realized my concern wasn't that warranted. For me it is about the tradeoff of dealing with types vs productivity. Sure I occasionally get bit by a random "method not defined for nil" error, but it is usually very easy to fix, and I don't run into the issue very often. With ruby, and especially rails, it is about the productivity gains. I can simply accomplish much more in less time and fewer lines of code than I would in other languages/frameworks. Not only am I writing fewer lines of code (usually), the language is very expressive without being overly cryptic. The code is more readable, and to me that results in better maintainability. The strong community and ecosystem emphasis that is put on testing, also leads to more resilient and much more maintainable code.

What an odd question lol. Yes, people like writing in Ruby. I’m one of the. Switched from C# in 2016.

I love Rails, its been my to-go framework for reference. But I could never get as confortable with Ruby as writing JS or PHP. I do not know the reason.

I do. It's a whole thing that get you down to writing your business logic in an expressive way very easily. Framework (Rails) helps, yes, but even pure Ruby can be nice. I've written a second time accuracy simulator for cars and chargers in a EV charging stations in pure Ruby, that was fast to iterate around and pleasant to write.

The ecosystem, toolchain and all do a lot. It is really missed when I do other languages, and I wish to find the same way of developing elsewhere. I currently do C for embedded in an horrible IDE, and I want to bang my head against the table each time I had to click on something on the interface.

(btw Python is a nightmare for me)

I spent more of my life that I would like to admit learning and writing Rust. I still build all of my web applications in almost pure Ruby these days. Speed of thought to action is simply unparalleled and it turns out in most situations that was the most important factor.

Yes, many people love programming in Ruby. It’s a matter of preference not some lack of technical merit. There are plenty of people who are well equipped in strongly typed languages that write in both. You might not know them but you really don’t have to look very far.

NodeJS and the siren's song of using the same language on the server as the client.

Despite the popularity, node never caught up with rails in terms of features and productivity. I was part of a replatforming from rails to node some 10 years ago. So many things we had to just rewrite because there was no option at the time in node. The team lead that made the decision left half-way through the project. Second worst thing to happen to me in my career, after covid of course.

Mobile came on scene, which meant you wanted an API, which split web development into backend and frontend. At the same time, the powerful-but-crusty complexities of enterprise Java backend world, which Rails stood in opposition to, started to get more lightweight and fashionable answers in the Go/Kafka/gRPC/microservices scene. While a very convenient overall development experience, it didn't stack up as well when considered in isolation as either a backend or a frontend technology. Much of the Javascript integration it has today (Turbo, etc) came after people had already moved on.

Performance, scalability or ultimately cost. Remember 10 - 15 years ago when Twitter was using Ruby it was a lot slower. Even without YJIT CRuby today would still be 2 - 3x faster than then. Tooling wasn't as good, Hardware were a lot more expensive at the time. So when you have news spread out about how RoR cant scale cheaply, they jump to newer and shinier things like Node.

I would guess running RoR today is 100x cheaper than 10 years before. And will continue to improve as we get ZJIT or running on top of JRuby.

> What caused the drop in popularity in RoR? It seemed like ~10-12 years ago RoR was the de-facto startup standard. On any given day there were multiple items on the HN front page having something to do with RoR

New things are "simple", and old things are inevitably complex, which always attracts the new generation of inexperienced coders (I include myself in this). This continues until all of the complexity of the domain are captured in the "new" thing, and the cycle begins again. Rails is vastly more sophisticated than when I started using it in ~2007, when things like CSRF attack mitigation weren't even built in. So it's a better framework now, but you have to understand a lot more to get started.

Also, from ~2012 until recently, bootcamps have been pumping out new programmers who only know Javascript because it was possible to do a full-stack web app with JS, and the bootcamps would rather not teach another language.

Around that same time, microservice architecture was the new hot. Rails apps tend to be monolithic. Now that many people have realized that microservice architecture is often not worth the complexity costs, monolithic apps are back in fashion, and people are rediscovering how great rails is.

* Node bringing JS to the backend.

* Python won in data science/analytics and AI/machine learning

* Python also seems to be the high level language used most in academia for non CS engineering (and CS too)

Rails continues to be relatively popular in early stage companies. Plenty of well known companies started with Rails in the last 10+ years and it continues on as part of their stack.

the allure of the new and shiny

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.

I keep reading about a shortage of phoenix jobs. Any advice?

Learn to use a remote debugger, and how to show the method source location.

This may sound snarky, but it's a good faith suggestion. Ruby has all of the tools to make debugging easy, but they're different than what you will expect if you come expecting things to work like in the static typing world.

But as much as I love Ruby, I do agree that Rails has too much unnecessary "magic". Much of which more modern Ruby is a reaction to. Personally I avoid Rails for my Ruby web projects.

> Then they realized it was hard to scale

A rumor perpetuated by exactly one company - Twitter. I know because I was there when it happened and helped dismantle the original monolith.

Rails scales just fine for 99%+ of business cases. If you're doing a sustained 5k writes per second with bursts up to 100k...sure maybe you need something more specialized.

Nah. If anything it's NodeJS that ate Rails' lunch. Around 2013/2014 it took over as the defacto default stack for startup.

The rails doesn't scale trope is pretty old at this point and has largely been discredited. Don't believe me, take a look at Shopify or Github.

It scales just fine. AirBnB, Github, and Shopify use it.

That makes perfect sense for people that need to scale. But doesn't explain why newer start ups aren't using it.

Doing things that don't scale is a proven strategy at the beginning, pg even has a post about it

https://www.paulgraham.com/ds.html

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”.

Thank you for clearing this up!