5 ms·

I personally can't wait for Rails to be a distant past. So many start-ups got burnt badly by using Rails -- easy to start, hard to scale, maintain, and extend.

by dk8996 10y ago

I personally can't wait for Rails to be a distant past. So many start-ups got burnt badly by using Rails -- easy to start, hard to scale, maintain, and extend. Rails is too opinionated and if your use-cases don't fit into "Rails way" your screwed.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
pmontra 10y ago
But at least it got them started and they could understand if there is a market for their product. My bet: if twitter started with Java Struts (it was 2006) they would have had to spend so much money and have needed so much time to launch that we would be using something else now. Not necessarily a system bootstrapped with Ruby, but you got the idea. > if your use-cases don't fit into "Rails way" your screwed Of course. If a startup service doesn't fit Rails, they should have picked something else. I'm not using Rails for everything.
- dk8996 10y ago
  Startups usually try on a bunch of use-cases (features, ideas, workflows) before they gain traction or die. Your saying that startups should know all the use-cases they plan on building before they even start -- that simply impossible. Maybe your point is that startups shouldn't use Rails and its more suited for dev projects with a clear spec.
  - danenania 10y ago
    Not really. Rails is good for quickly hacking things together across a very wide range of the domains that startups usually play in, which makes it as good as anything out there when upfront productivity is the priority and you have rapidly evolving specs. The only really common startup use case it's decidedly bad at is realtime/sockets/streaming data, where Node takes its place as the hack-it-together tool of choice--at a significant productivity penalty compared to Rails. It's also, of course, pretty bad at all kinds of tasks unrelated to web development or REST apis. You wouldn't want to write machine learning algorithms or do statistical analysis in Rails, just like you wouldn't want to do 3d game development in Rails. And while you do occasionally see startups who have bolted some heavy data processing or pseudo-ML monstrosity onto their Rails apps, I've never seen anyone in the Rails community claim that was a good idea. The vanilla recommendation there is to keep your main server stack in Rails and then write services in something more appropriate for those needs.
jupp0r 10y ago
From what I've seen, this is exactly what it's good for. Get something going fast. When scale is needed later, the microservice journey starts ... I agree with the author wholeheartedly, but there is certainly value in getting something that works quickly.
- dk8996 10y ago
  Your also implying that easy to get started and ( scale, maintain, and extend) are mutually exclusive. I am saying they are not and don't have to be. Moreover, this kind of thinking just proves the point of why we need to move of from Rails.
  - danenania 10y ago
    Move from Rails into what? Nobody is disagreeing that Rails has problems, but until there's a battle-tested replacement out there with a similarly strong community and range of libraries it's all just theorizing.
wuliwong 10y ago
Can you give some examples? I've always heard people blast Rails b/c of Twitter's experience but Twitter did survive it and scale. Maybe Twitter would have never gotten to the level of success they did without using Rails? Also, I'm not convinced that the original developers at Twitter did a great job implementing the first Twitter infrastructure. It is possible to write bad code using Rails that would be bad no matter what language or framework was used. It's a huge unknown in that story that entirely changes how to judge the outcome.
fiatjaf 10y ago
Just rewrite everything in Go.
elliotec 10y ago
Back up what you're saying. Rails built a lot of extremely successful companies. It is not hard to scale or maintain if you are competent. If you scale beyond the capacity of Rails, you are Twitter and it's ok to move on. I think your statement is patently false.
- dk8996 10y ago
  I am seeing good amount of comments saying "Twitter did it", this is simply a logical error (survival bias). Moreover, I think Twitter would of been successfully even without using RoR.
  - elliotec 10y ago
    Github, Airbnb, Dribbble, Bloomberg, Genius, Funny or Die, Goodreads, Groupon, Hulu, Kickstarter, Shopify, Square, Twitch, Soundcloud, etc etc etc. So yeah, survival bias. If startups failed and used Rails, it's because they were bad startups for reasons outside using Rails.

by dk8996 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

pmontra 10y ago

But at least it got them started and they could understand if there is a market for their product. My bet: if twitter started with Java Struts (it was 2006) they would have had to spend so much money and have needed so much time to launch that we would be using something else now. Not necessarily a system bootstrapped with Ruby, but you got the idea. > if your use-cases don't fit into "Rails way" your screwed Of course. If a startup service doesn't fit Rails, they should have picked something else. I'm not using Rails for everything.

dk8996 10y ago
Startups usually try on a bunch of use-cases (features, ideas, workflows) before they gain traction or die. Your saying that startups should know all the use-cases they plan on building before they even start -- that simply impossible. Maybe your point is that startups shouldn't use Rails and its more suited for dev projects with a clear spec.
- danenania 10y ago
  Not really. Rails is good for quickly hacking things together across a very wide range of the domains that startups usually play in, which makes it as good as anything out there when upfront productivity is the priority and you have rapidly evolving specs. The only really common startup use case it's decidedly bad at is realtime/sockets/streaming data, where Node takes its place as the hack-it-together tool of choice--at a significant productivity penalty compared to Rails. It's also, of course, pretty bad at all kinds of tasks unrelated to web development or REST apis. You wouldn't want to write machine learning algorithms or do statistical analysis in Rails, just like you wouldn't want to do 3d game development in Rails. And while you do occasionally see startups who have bolted some heavy data processing or pseudo-ML monstrosity onto their Rails apps, I've never seen anyone in the Rails community claim that was a good idea. The vanilla recommendation there is to keep your main server stack in Rails and then write services in something more appropriate for those needs.

jupp0r 10y ago

From what I've seen, this is exactly what it's good for. Get something going fast. When scale is needed later, the microservice journey starts ... I agree with the author wholeheartedly, but there is certainly value in getting something that works quickly.

dk8996 10y ago
Your also implying that easy to get started and ( scale, maintain, and extend) are mutually exclusive. I am saying they are not and don't have to be. Moreover, this kind of thinking just proves the point of why we need to move of from Rails.
- danenania 10y ago
  Move from Rails into what? Nobody is disagreeing that Rails has problems, but until there's a battle-tested replacement out there with a similarly strong community and range of libraries it's all just theorizing.

wuliwong 10y ago

Can you give some examples? I've always heard people blast Rails b/c of Twitter's experience but Twitter did survive it and scale. Maybe Twitter would have never gotten to the level of success they did without using Rails? Also, I'm not convinced that the original developers at Twitter did a great job implementing the first Twitter infrastructure. It is possible to write bad code using Rails that would be bad no matter what language or framework was used. It's a huge unknown in that story that entirely changes how to judge the outcome.

fiatjaf 10y ago

Just rewrite everything in Go.

elliotec 10y ago

Back up what you're saying. Rails built a lot of extremely successful companies. It is not hard to scale or maintain if you are competent. If you scale beyond the capacity of Rails, you are Twitter and it's ok to move on. I think your statement is patently false.

dk8996 10y ago
I am seeing good amount of comments saying "Twitter did it", this is simply a logical error (survival bias). Moreover, I think Twitter would of been successfully even without using RoR.
- elliotec 10y ago
  Github, Airbnb, Dribbble, Bloomberg, Genius, Funny or Die, Goodreads, Groupon, Hulu, Kickstarter, Shopify, Square, Twitch, Soundcloud, etc etc etc. So yeah, survival bias. If startups failed and used Rails, it's because they were bad startups for reasons outside using Rails.