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> If a Rubyist never sticks nose outside their beloved technology stack, noone makes such a big deal out of it. To be fair, Rails is amazing, the most cutting-

> If a Rubyist never sticks nose outside their beloved technology stack, noone makes such a big deal out of it. To be fair, Rails is amazing, the most cutting-edge web framework out there, and it's settling into adulthood nicely. The Ruby ecosystem is so perfectly suited to web development that one hardly needs to go elsewhere to get what one needs. Whatever you could need is right at hand. The .NET dev sitting across from me doesn't even use legit source control. He has his own hacked-together solution for his own projects, but most of what he does, he claims source control just doesn't work. I think the main problem is that .NET tries to be all things to all devs, and so ends up solving no problems really well. People really seem to go gaga over C#, and to be sure the language isn't terrible like C/C++/Java, but it's pretty damn far from being spectacular. Ruby isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread either, but one can be enormously productive with it.

UK-AL 11y ago
I'm fairly sure you get beginner rails developers like that as well. We use GIT, BDD, TDD NServiceBus. Distributed load balanced services, that you can deploy independently. Micro services would be the buzzword for it. CQRS, ServiceStack, MVC, CI, Peer Code reviews We've never had any downtime, our code is clean, we support tons of users and don't really need lots of servers to support it. Not everybody is the same.
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  Well, not really, it would be more difficult to work without git and Github in Rails than it would be to work with it. Every tutorial starts you out with it. The big struggle these days is over TDD.
matwood 11y ago
> The .NET dev sitting across from me doesn't even use legit source control. So only .NET devs are bad? Got it.
edgyswingset 11y ago
I wouldn't let that personal experience bias your view. StackOverflow (often pointed to by .NET devs) is a prime example of engineers utilizing and pushing the limits of any tool you give them. I've also personally met and spoken with numerous .NET devs who are really good at what they do.
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  I never said there weren't. I know a really awesome C++ / Java dev that works with medical devices. That doesn't mean C++ isn't a terrible language. Very mature, and with the right libraries, tooling, and 30 years of experience, you can do amazing things fast with it. Just because a language / tech stack is terrible doesn't mean there aren't great people using it to do great things. Should a new dev learn C++? I'd say they'd be better off with Go or Rust depending on what they're trying to do. Do we really want to be stuck with old, terrible languages forever? Imagine if we had to do web dev in Pascal.
justathrow2k 11y ago
>The .NET dev sitting across from me doesn't even use legit source control. Well, there you have it, this guy knows a .NET dev who doesn't use legit version control, so the whole .NET stack is a joke. QED.
- V-2 11y ago
  But it proves my point perfectly - anti .NET "racism" at its finest :) If - say - some Perl dev with academia background was ignorant of VCS, he'd just be a bad developer and that's it...
DevKoala 11y ago
If a .NET developer who doesn't use proper source control seats next to you, then perhaps you should take a hard look at the place you work, maybe leave. When I worked with .NET I used TFS and Git. Also, I implemented RESTful web services using .NET's Web API, consumed by a large scale SPA implemented on AngularJS/TypeScript. I never had a complain. Now, I work on an open source stack, and Rails is suited to only one project out of the multiple web services and applications I deal with. Rails does it's job well, but it isn't suited for everything.
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  > Rails is suited to only one project out of the multiple web services and applications I deal with. What else do you use, and, if you don't mind elaborating, why did you pick those instead of Rails? My understanding is the more technologies you introduce, the more complex your infrastructure gets, so you're better off picking one web stack, one back-end, etc.
  - DevKoala 11y ago
    At the company I work for, we have 5 (off the top of my head) different micro services written in Sinatra. Two front end applications built in AngularJS, running off a NodeJS backend (which serves the static content), and one Rails application. For the micro-services, Sinatra does the job very well, there is no need for all of the components that Rails provides; we like the flexibility. Our front end developers have complete ownership of the two front-end apps, and they rolled with NodeJS because it allowed them to take advantage of their JavaScript skills. The Rails app is an internal consumption app. It doesn't need to be fancy or have a need to scale. Rails and Bootstrap keep it simple stupid. The meat of our stack is actually on the big data technologies we deal with, RedShift and Hive. We could honestly re-write any of the micro-services in .NET or any other stack for that matter, and still keep our infrastructure mostly the same.
WorldWideWayne 11y ago
> Whatever you could need is right at hand. Except speed, a really nice IDE and good Windows support. > The Ruby ecosystem is so perfectly suited to web development that one hardly needs to go elsewhere to get what one needs... > I think the main problem is that .NET tries to be all things to all devs... So Ruby is all things to web devs, but it's a bad thing that .NET has the same goal for Windows-centric devs? That doesn't make any sense. > C#...it's pretty damn far from being spectacular. OK, why? Your response is full of opinion but you don't really back it up with any reasoning - so why should any value your words?
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  > Except speed, a really nice IDE and good Windows support. Web dev doesn't need any of these things. If you need them, then what you are doing isn't web dev, it's something else. > it's a bad thing that .NET has the same goal for Windows-centric devs? What is "Windows-centric" development? That doesn't even make sense. Web dev is a fairly specific domain with a standards-based protocol stack that's been iterated reliably on for 30 some-odd years. The sources of variability, the browsers themselves, are well-documented now and even when the variations weren't, you could earn a pretty good living specializing in them. Microsoft seems to throw their devs under the bus with every new release.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - untog 11y ago
    If you're wondering why you are being downvoted, everything you've stated so far has been opinion with no facts to back it up. Why do you think Ruby is more productive than C#? From my position (as someone who has worked with both lightly, but not extensively) I don't see it - things like LINQ in C# are enormously productive.
    - vinceguidry 11y ago
      I'm not wondering, I've been around the block long enough to know how the upvote / downvote convention works. I'm actually surprised I'm not being downvoted more. Dynamic typing adds an entire layer of depth to the things you can do with tooling, over and on top of what you can do with reflection. If I don't know what's going on in a web app, I can load it up in a developer console, get right to where it's going wrong, and start inspecting everything I can see, even looking up the source code of the methods, whether in my app or in the framework, right in the REPL. You mention LINQ, that makes C# dev bearable by cutting down on the syntax you need to do basic functional programming. I wouldn't call it "enormously productive".

UK-AL 11y ago

I'm fairly sure you get beginner rails developers like that as well. We use GIT, BDD, TDD NServiceBus. Distributed load balanced services, that you can deploy independently. Micro services would be the buzzword for it. CQRS, ServiceStack, MVC, CI, Peer Code reviews We've never had any downtime, our code is clean, we support tons of users and don't really need lots of servers to support it. Not everybody is the same.

vinceguidry 11y ago
Well, not really, it would be more difficult to work without git and Github in Rails than it would be to work with it. Every tutorial starts you out with it. The big struggle these days is over TDD.

matwood 11y ago

> The .NET dev sitting across from me doesn't even use legit source control. So only .NET devs are bad? Got it.

edgyswingset 11y ago

I wouldn't let that personal experience bias your view. StackOverflow (often pointed to by .NET devs) is a prime example of engineers utilizing and pushing the limits of any tool you give them. I've also personally met and spoken with numerous .NET devs who are really good at what they do.

vinceguidry 11y ago
I never said there weren't. I know a really awesome C++ / Java dev that works with medical devices. That doesn't mean C++ isn't a terrible language. Very mature, and with the right libraries, tooling, and 30 years of experience, you can do amazing things fast with it. Just because a language / tech stack is terrible doesn't mean there aren't great people using it to do great things. Should a new dev learn C++? I'd say they'd be better off with Go or Rust depending on what they're trying to do. Do we really want to be stuck with old, terrible languages forever? Imagine if we had to do web dev in Pascal.

justathrow2k 11y ago

>The .NET dev sitting across from me doesn't even use legit source control. Well, there you have it, this guy knows a .NET dev who doesn't use legit version control, so the whole .NET stack is a joke. QED.

V-2 11y ago
But it proves my point perfectly - anti .NET "racism" at its finest :) If - say - some Perl dev with academia background was ignorant of VCS, he'd just be a bad developer and that's it...

DevKoala 11y ago

If a .NET developer who doesn't use proper source control seats next to you, then perhaps you should take a hard look at the place you work, maybe leave. When I worked with .NET I used TFS and Git. Also, I implemented RESTful web services using .NET's Web API, consumed by a large scale SPA implemented on AngularJS/TypeScript. I never had a complain. Now, I work on an open source stack, and Rails is suited to only one project out of the multiple web services and applications I deal with. Rails does it's job well, but it isn't suited for everything.

vinceguidry 11y ago
> Rails is suited to only one project out of the multiple web services and applications I deal with. What else do you use, and, if you don't mind elaborating, why did you pick those instead of Rails? My understanding is the more technologies you introduce, the more complex your infrastructure gets, so you're better off picking one web stack, one back-end, etc.
- DevKoala 11y ago
  At the company I work for, we have 5 (off the top of my head) different micro services written in Sinatra. Two front end applications built in AngularJS, running off a NodeJS backend (which serves the static content), and one Rails application. For the micro-services, Sinatra does the job very well, there is no need for all of the components that Rails provides; we like the flexibility. Our front end developers have complete ownership of the two front-end apps, and they rolled with NodeJS because it allowed them to take advantage of their JavaScript skills. The Rails app is an internal consumption app. It doesn't need to be fancy or have a need to scale. Rails and Bootstrap keep it simple stupid. The meat of our stack is actually on the big data technologies we deal with, RedShift and Hive. We could honestly re-write any of the micro-services in .NET or any other stack for that matter, and still keep our infrastructure mostly the same.

WorldWideWayne 11y ago

> Whatever you could need is right at hand. Except speed, a really nice IDE and good Windows support. > The Ruby ecosystem is so perfectly suited to web development that one hardly needs to go elsewhere to get what one needs... > I think the main problem is that .NET tries to be all things to all devs... So Ruby is all things to web devs, but it's a bad thing that .NET has the same goal for Windows-centric devs? That doesn't make any sense. > C#...it's pretty damn far from being spectacular. OK, why? Your response is full of opinion but you don't really back it up with any reasoning - so why should any value your words?

vinceguidry 11y ago
> Except speed, a really nice IDE and good Windows support. Web dev doesn't need any of these things. If you need them, then what you are doing isn't web dev, it's something else. > it's a bad thing that .NET has the same goal for Windows-centric devs? What is "Windows-centric" development? That doesn't even make sense. Web dev is a fairly specific domain with a standards-based protocol stack that's been iterated reliably on for 30 some-odd years. The sources of variability, the browsers themselves, are well-documented now and even when the variations weren't, you could earn a pretty good living specializing in them. Microsoft seems to throw their devs under the bus with every new release.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- untog 11y ago
  If you're wondering why you are being downvoted, everything you've stated so far has been opinion with no facts to back it up. Why do you think Ruby is more productive than C#? From my position (as someone who has worked with both lightly, but not extensively) I don't see it - things like LINQ in C# are enormously productive.
  - vinceguidry 11y ago
    I'm not wondering, I've been around the block long enough to know how the upvote / downvote convention works. I'm actually surprised I'm not being downvoted more. Dynamic typing adds an entire layer of depth to the things you can do with tooling, over and on top of what you can do with reflection. If I don't know what's going on in a web app, I can load it up in a developer console, get right to where it's going wrong, and start inspecting everything I can see, even looking up the source code of the methods, whether in my app or in the framework, right in the REPL. You mention LINQ, that makes C# dev bearable by cutting down on the syntax you need to do basic functional programming. I wouldn't call it "enormously productive".