8 ms·

Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails still worth it?

68 points by ahacker15 9y ago

sidcool 9y ago
Yes. It's still a very good framework for simple Web Apps. It's takes care of a lot of boilerplate. With Rails 5, it's good for a simple API backend as well. And there are a ton of gems that can alleviate a lot of pain. It's when something non trivial where Rails may not be a good choice.
matchmike1313 9y ago
In my opinion, yes. I recently built a recent project in Rails 5 and it was rock solid. As your JS needs evolve or you want to start from scratch with a JS framework you can even use Webpacker to introduce Vue or React into your app easily and manage dependencies with Yarn.
- mhfs 9y ago
  This. Webpacker enormously improved the JS experience with Rails.
austenallred 9y ago
The simple answer is it probably depends on what you’re doing and what you’re optimizing for. I don’t know of a better way to get an MVP project up quickly. Rails at scale is probably a touch harder to manage, but that’s by no means impossible.
joshenglish 9y ago
I'm of the opinion of using the best tool for the job. If you need an MVP fat then use Rails but if not evaluate other options. Please your need may come from what you know best.
touchofevil 9y ago
Wouldn't Python/Django make more sense in 2018 considering that Python could be used for data science and machine learning? I realize this is a Python vs Ruby question, but if you didn't know either Python or Ruby and were trying to pick between Django and Rails for a project, wouldn't you pick Django in 2018 due to future data science and machine learning opportunities?
- hamandcheese 9y ago
  Merely knowing python does not a data scientist make.
  - touchofevil 9y ago
    Of course, but wouldn't one be better preparing themselves for data science by working with python/django on a web app vs working with Ruby/Rails?
    - hamandcheese 9y ago
      I think knowing python is just a small part. So yes, it would help, just not enough for it to matter (unless you know up front that you want to do these things).
- mod 9y ago
  No. Learning Python is quick and simple compared to learning data science or machine learning. Knowing Python and Django (which I do) does not afford you any ability do to those things.
  - touchofevil 9y ago
    Interesting. I assumed that spending more time working with Python would be beneficial, but I guess it's not a big deal. This is great to know, as I've been resistant to starting with Ruby/Rails for the reason I described. Thanks!
    - hamandcheese 9y ago
      I don’t do machine learning or data science, so I’m assuming here, but I would imagine whatever you end up doing would be en entirely different service than your web stack and could be whatever language you wanted.
    - mod 9y ago
      Learning Ruby would give you a big leg up over starting from scratch learning Python. I don't know if you are familiar with any programming languages at all, but many skills translate cross-language...the paradigms are the same. Particularly with Ruby & Python which are very similar languages. They're good at the same things, by and large. Taking your Ruby skills over to Python will be a matter of "google: [python thing] in ruby". For a specific example, Python has a unique thing called "list comprehensions". Using that google string you can get some great ideas about replicating that functionality in Ruby. Anyway, on a grander scale, picking up new languages is the easy part of programming--even when they're not so similar. Best of luck!
eximius 9y ago
No. What does rails have that a different python framework doesn't have? And you'll save yourself the tears of migrating later.
- danmaz74 9y ago
  Why would you need to migrate to Python later? I can understand needing to migrate to something more performant/easy to scale, but Python doesn't have any advantage on Ruby in that department.
  - eximius 9y ago
    Not migrate to python, migration away from Rails. I'm suggesting Python as an alternative to Rails to start with.
    - danmaz74 9y ago
      You still didn't answer why would I want to migrate away from Rails. Python has no advantage I can think of (unless one has to work with data analysis).
      - eximius 9y ago
        My experience is admittedly tainted because we migrated away from a Rails codebase and it was not fun. The Rails code was extremely convoluted and encourages metaprogramming in a way that is very un-typed. Basically, I think Rails is inferior because it encourages bad practices, has no distinct advantages over Python, Python seems to have a larger talent pool, and Python has uses outside of Rails that make it a better choice for a one-language shop (i.e., your tools can be in the same language as your code and can utilize that + Python is everywhere, Ruby has extra devops costs incurred). I won't say you can't be successful with Ruby. That'd be silly. But do I think there is a reason to choose Rails over Python if you can start fresh? Nope.
joshfng 9y ago
Absolutely. If you're building a POC or MVP it's a quick and easy way to get something off the ground. The framework will take you pretty far before you have scaling issues (long enough to know if what you're making is worth it). The community is very knowledgeable and friendly, and gems for almost everything already exist. If I needed to spin up a new project and get to work right away on something I'd go with rails no question. I've yet to find another language/framework combo that works as well as a Ruby & Rails stack (Laravel and Django are good alternatives too, I'm just more experienced with Ruby). Don't think too far ahead. Premature optimization or thinking about future scaling issues if starting a new project is time that could be spent better. Rails isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
Techbrunch 9y ago
Pretty sure that this Quora answer from DHH is still valid in 2018: https://www.quora.com/What-makes-Rails-a-framework-worth-learning-in-2017 https://www.quora.com/What-makes-Rails-a-framework-worth-lea...
Iwan-Zotow 9y ago
No
- dang 9y ago
  Could you please not post unsubstantive comments to HN? We're trying for a higher standard here. If you'd take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html and follow the spirit of the site, we'd appreciate it.
sb8244 9y ago
Yes, Rails helps developers make good upfront choices to the structuring of their application and database. The DB layer and structure is going to be a bottleneck well before the programming framework is (I think this is true in any framework). I enjoy that Rails makes it easy to do things like take care of N+1 queries, do associations correctly, etc. That isn't exclusive to Rails, but it is really good in Rails.
- mmartinson 9y ago
  I think Rails helps developers make ok choices to the structuring of their application, particular if it's serving a domain that models easily into a fairly conventional RESTish-API relational data structure. The strongly-held conventions (in both framework and community) that position it so well for upfront productivity don't leave a ton of space for taking a proactive approach to managing complexity in a trickier domain. Smart, experienced people can of course identify where the framework leaves off and build within the confines of Rails to get things done. But I wouldn't say that Rails makes it particularly easy to, for example, use a object-oriented approach the the model layer. ActiveRecord, with its lovely but dangerous APIs, really wants to be your everything class. Domain namespacing, while doable (you can do anything in Ruby), isn't particularly intuitive compared to other parts of the framework. None of this is to say that Rails is a bad tool and I'm grateful for what it's provided (thank you OSS maintainers). It does, however, trade medium-term maintainability for the up-front productivity it offers, which could be totally fine, but for me doesn't feel like a great trade.
  - sb8244 9y ago
    A tool in the hands of an expert will be used differently than a non expert. The model layer that AR suggests might not be good for an expert, but it will certainly help a non expert build their app for some time without too severe of issues. You are right that it's far from perfect and it really is a "be everything" ORM.
Zyst 9y ago
From someone who doesn't use Rails day-to-day: It's still about as relevant as it used to be before, for the same reasons it was relevant then. In summary: If you need to get shit done fast, it's a good bet. It isn't as hyped as it used to be 5 or so years ago, and if hype cycles are relevant to you, you likely already know your answer. As to whether you are asking whether learning it would make you unemployable, by no means. RoR is still going strong, at least in my country.
benehmke 9y ago
It’s so fast to spin up, deploy, and iterate on a rails app it’s insane. As stated, it depends on your context and your goals, but if speed matters to you, it’s hard to say rails is not a top solution.
1as 9y ago
Yes. Rails has by now certainly crossed into boring software territory – arguably a [positive thing](http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology) anyway – but it remains an excellent choice coming into 2018: - Out of the box, Rails has close to unbeatable developer ergonomics, tooling, stability, and ease of use - Lots of high quality, large companies use it (GitHub, Shopify, Airbnb, Square, Twitch) and have by now figured out how to scale it, often sharing and open sourcing their efforts, e.g. https://github.com/Shopify/identity_cache https://github.com/Shopify/identity_cache - If your product front end is simple, Turbolinks can be an excellent choice (find me a faster, more bug free product than Basecamp) - If you prefer to use a more modern JavaScript solution on the front end like Ember or React, Rails API is a perfect fit - The Ruby ecosystem and community are both very high quality
- foodstances 9y ago
  Boring yet still very volatile. I wonder if or when Rails will settle down and stop changing everything between major releases causing all documentation to be out of date, gems to break, developer habits to break, etc. Not to mention all of the related tooling like Bundler which seems to spit out new and uninteresting warnings and errors every time I update it. It would be great to be able to write an application using a framework and not have to constantly change the application just to get long-term updates to the framework like bug fixes, security patches, compatibility with new versions of Ruby, etc. Basically Rails-LTS but not from a 3rd-party (and embraced by the ecosystem).
  - jeffnappi 9y ago
    Volatile in comparison to what exactly?
    - true_religion 9y ago
      In comparison to Python, where things just work for years without being touched. Upgrading can get you a better api or performance for a specific workload but rarely will it be necessary.
stevebmark 9y ago
Much of what you learn in Ruby and Rails is not portable to other languages. Ruby and Rails are deeply flawed and much of what you learn is dealing with those flaws. Similar to learning PHP for example (but differently flawed than PHP). Ruby is also showing its age and is lagging behind modern languages. Rails is probably fine and fast and good for small projects. It is probably not good for professional large projects.
- aaronbrethorst 9y ago
  You should let AirBnb and GitHub know.
  - stevebmark 9y ago
    Oh, believe me, they know
    - mmartinson 9y ago
      Hahaha
- Finnucane 9y ago
  There should be a Hacker News MadLibs form: UserOne: Don't use [insert language] and [insert framework] because [bad design flaw] and doesn't scale. UserTwo: But [BigCo with millions of users].
- mrgordon 9y ago
  What web dev languages/frameworks aren’t deeply flawed and teach you more portable skills?
  - stevebmark 9y ago
    Unfortunately I would say Javascript. Unlike Ruby, you will learn about compilers, static analysis, linting (eslint is more useful than rubocop), type systems, function composition, and have a good alternative to OO based programing built into the language (as opposed to your `UnboundMethod` lambda block proc whateverthehell design flaw Ruby has now). Javascript also gives you decent jumping off points into languages you will learn more from (Elm, Purescript).
abritinthebay 9y ago
There’s nothing wrong with Rails in 2018. It’s maybe not the most forward-looking choice you could make but it’ll get you running quickly. But if you have a smart team and a little bit of time for ramping up then I’d suggest Elixir+Phoenix or Node tbh. Rails is good at what it’s designed to be - a one stop shop for fast to develop, kinda dirty, framework magic, webdev. And there is nothing wrong with that.
- danmaz74 9y ago
  Node with which framework? By itself it's not comparable to Rails.
  - abritinthebay 9y ago
    True! Though I actually think that’s a good thing (imo too much magic & abstraction in a framework leads to bad app design because too much is hidden). But that sort of reinforces the point I was making tbh. Want something that makes all those choice for you? Right or wrong? Rails. Nothing wrong with that as such, but it will cause issues eventually.
sandGorgon 9y ago
It depends on whether or not you are on the React bandwagon. Yes Rails does work with React - but this means two different asset pipelines (Rails and React/Node). If I was building a product focused stack, then I would simply do React+ Typescript. Why bother bringing in two different languages for front end and backend ? Typescript is pretty awesome in itself.
danmaz74 9y ago
I've yet to find anything that comes close to Rails in programmer productivity for the web. So, as long as programmer productivity is a concern, it's relevant. EDIT: On the other hand, I wouldn't choose Rails for a project where the main concern is performance/scalability
- ComputerGuru 9y ago
  Try ASP.NET. It’s managed to take learn most of the lessons (what to avoid and what to replicate) from RoR and is built around a better language (C# or others of your choice) and environment (Visual Studio and MSDN) to boot. Now that .NET with .NET Core is officially a first-class citizen on Linux, there really no good reason not to embrace it.
  - cutler 9y ago
    Except that Visual Studio 2017 is a dog, especially on Windows 10.
FBISurveillance 9y ago
Ruby on Rails is a great bet for those who need to kickstart fast. When Ruby/Rails becomes a performance bottleneck you're probably already making tens of millions and have dozens of people to diversify your tech stack. Core team takes care of many things like webpack, ActiveStorage, etc for you, many thanks to folks. I've been doing Ruby on Rails since 0.19 as far as I remember and it's been great ever since. Not that hyped anymore but who cares about hype when you get your shit done. Also as you grow, you appreciate talent availability when it comes to Ruby/Rails.
yedpodtrzitko 9y ago
I'm not Rubyist, but when I see an article about RoR it's one of these: "I just started using Ruby and omg it's out-of-box everything, rapid development, monkeypatching makes everything super easy, it's like second Jesus coming." and the second category is this: "I am working with RoR for years, maintaining/migrating anything is super painful, because everyone is monkeypatching everything, so you cant safely touch anything." Choose wisely.
- mrgordon 9y ago
  Maybe this says something about the article writers? Most Rails applications I see have minimal monkeypatching and I can’t remember the last time I had to debug an issue related to one. On the contrary, monkeypatching is most often used to fix issues in libraries that would otherwise require forking or pushing changes upstream to the project to fix. For example, Rails 3.2 is missing a few time duration methods from Rails 4 which Ruby 2.4 relies on so you need to add those via monkeypatch to run Ruby 2.4 with the legacy Rails version if you can’t upgrade everything at once.
- jeffnappi 9y ago
  The second category there is typically people who adopted Rails and then ignored it's culture of testing. One thing about Ruby is that you better have good test coverage if you ever want to be able to safely upgrade your dependencies.
- dizzystar 9y ago
  gem install hairball
matte_black 9y ago
If you already know Rails, yes. If you are thinking about learning Rails now, probably not. Yes Rails is great for MVPs, but then so are a lot of other things, like Meteor.
- kapauldo 9y ago
  What would you suggest if you don't know rails?
  - mmartinson 9y ago
    I would suggest Elixir/Phoenix if your priority is maintaining and scaling a business application. I would offer that suggestion with caution, though, if you're considering building a core skill set for employability today. A small contingent of the experienced Ruby community have become fervent Elixir evangelists, but the number of successful projects, jobs and skilled candidates is a miniscule fraction of Ruby and other mainstream choices.
    - cutler 9y ago
      Yes, here in London Elixir jobs are still very thin on the ground. I don't see Elixir moving beyond its current position in the job market. It has everything - great concurrency, Phoenix - except mindshare and adoption. In another era, with less competition I would have bet on Elixir but not today.
- techeigh 9y ago
  Would you still recommend Rails if the person has absolutely zero Ruby/Javascript knowledge (but functioning HTML/CSS)?
thegabez 9y ago
Still one of the best, if not best, choices for building a CRUD web app. I don't see this changing any time soon.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Shicholas 9y ago
No. Long time rails developer, but if you can green-light a project I'd highly recommend node all the way. I've found it much easier to comprehend a pure javascript stack (or even better an all-Typescript stack) due to substantially less cognitive overhead, find other people to work with (very important as your project scales), and the fact I can deploy node with a serverless implementation on Azure, GCP, and AWS makes it a home run when it comes to security and devops costs (and the need for devops in general). While rails has a bunch of great features, those features (rightfully) have been copied elsewhere, e.g. Active Record, which has a fantastic javascript implementation - TypeORM. Finally, when it comes to interface development, nothing in rails will get you as far as React these days, especially as the web moves mobile, and into AR/VR, which IMO present the next challenges of interface development. And like rails, nearly every question related to React/Node is answered on Stack Overflow or has a well-documented library to solve that use case.
- wgjordan 9y ago
  > Finally, when it comes to interface development, nothing in rails will get you as far as React these days Rails's out-of-the-box React integration [1] should get you _exactly_ as far as React these days. [1] https://github.com/rails/webpacker#react https://github.com/rails/webpacker#react
  - Shicholas 9y ago
    While this is interesting, you're proposing a monolithic repo with two predominant languages. I think it's much harder to get the benefits of riding the NPM wave while the front-end is stuck in a rails project such as using Typescript, React Native, etc. These are all possible of course, but there's a Rails Webpacker library that's an extra intermediary between the author and their JS code.
- anko 9y ago
  It seems like you're comparing a framework with a language? What framework do you use on node.js? My experience with nodejs has been pretty poor. I'll give some examples; * The language and runtime is constantly updating - there is no such thing as stability * Even npm couldn't produce deterministic installs until this year * npm dependency hell * there are lots of ways to do any task, so there is much fragmentation with advice / community * the repls in node suck compared to pry * I can't find a good opinionated framework - so everyone lays out each application differently, with different standards etc. That means you end up spending a ridiculous amount of time configuring everything. * most apps i've needed to make don't actually benefit from being a SPA. It's a cargo cult thing. * javascript as a language sucks!
_d8fd 9y ago
Speaking for myself, and I tend to make practical choices for what I understand now. At the moment, I am not using Rails in my day to day work, and this is largely based on my past experiences. Pros: - easy enough to find libraries for most things I wanna do - community likes testing, as do I - community seems to focus on business & web implementations, so good for those use cases - lots of questions for which I want answers already answered - package management - deployment to PaaS/Herorku-ish platforms pretty easy for smaller teams - here in San Francisco, there are lots of job opportunities for Rails developers - I like Ruby, even though I am less excited about OOP these days Cons: - Rails is magical & opinionated, and that always annoys me - Figuring out where some method is coming from in a Rails object is often a pain - In Elixir I almost never need a debugger, but in Ruby I almost always do - loading Rails apps can get really slow, and learning to wait for software to boot isn't a skill I like to develop - I feel more pressure "to do it" right when the time "to do it right" simply doesn't exist for reasons, because trying to come back and refactor gnarly Ruby code is just harder than it is in a compiled language - Ruby has to be installed on the system to which an app is deployed, and needing to think about how to pre-install Ruby or how long a Ruby install takes is a mild pain (stand alone Go binaries or Elixir releases are pretty sweet)
- mmartinson 9y ago
  I feel like figuring out where a method is coming from to be a routine source of tedium and a massive gumption trap when working on Ruby projects. This, along with bugs rooted in hidden state mutations, far overshadows the time saving conveniences in Ruby and Rails for me.
  - amorphid 9y ago
    When I have creative freedom, I use Rails for routing, serving requests, and talking to the DB. I try to not to lean too heavily on Rails for business logic stuff.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
drny 9y ago
Yes. I have used rails since about 0.6 and evaluated other frameworks since. Nothing comes close for me, especially for CRUD apps. For anything complicated (50+ models), things can begin to feel unwieldy but it helps to be disciplined about how you structure your code. I find trailblazer very useful in that regard. I've recently started to learn vue.js and it's making JavaScript a pleasure to use alongside rails. I think my future projects will be vue + rails by default
jgalvez 9y ago
No.
thebiglebrewski 9y ago
Yes! The Rails core is quite stable and the community continues to innovate. I've recently gotten very involved with Devise Token Auth, an open source project that helps you use Devise on apps that do auth on the client side, like those written in Vue and React. We're on the hunt for new contributors: https://github.com/lynndylanhurley/devise_token_auth https://github.com/lynndylanhurley/devise_token_auth

68 points by ahacker15 9y ago

Yes. It's still a very good framework for simple Web Apps. It's takes care of a lot of boilerplate. With Rails 5, it's good for a simple API backend as well. And there are a ton of gems that can alleviate a lot of pain. It's when something non trivial where Rails may not be a good choice.

matchmike1313 9y ago

In my opinion, yes. I recently built a recent project in Rails 5 and it was rock solid. As your JS needs evolve or you want to start from scratch with a JS framework you can even use Webpacker to introduce Vue or React into your app easily and manage dependencies with Yarn.

mhfs 9y ago
This. Webpacker enormously improved the JS experience with Rails.

austenallred 9y ago

The simple answer is it probably depends on what you’re doing and what you’re optimizing for. I don’t know of a better way to get an MVP project up quickly. Rails at scale is probably a touch harder to manage, but that’s by no means impossible.

joshenglish 9y ago

I'm of the opinion of using the best tool for the job. If you need an MVP fat then use Rails but if not evaluate other options. Please your need may come from what you know best.

touchofevil 9y ago

Wouldn't Python/Django make more sense in 2018 considering that Python could be used for data science and machine learning? I realize this is a Python vs Ruby question, but if you didn't know either Python or Ruby and were trying to pick between Django and Rails for a project, wouldn't you pick Django in 2018 due to future data science and machine learning opportunities?

hamandcheese 9y ago
Merely knowing python does not a data scientist make.
- touchofevil 9y ago
  Of course, but wouldn't one be better preparing themselves for data science by working with python/django on a web app vs working with Ruby/Rails?
  - hamandcheese 9y ago
    I think knowing python is just a small part. So yes, it would help, just not enough for it to matter (unless you know up front that you want to do these things).
mod 9y ago
No. Learning Python is quick and simple compared to learning data science or machine learning. Knowing Python and Django (which I do) does not afford you any ability do to those things.
- touchofevil 9y ago
  Interesting. I assumed that spending more time working with Python would be beneficial, but I guess it's not a big deal. This is great to know, as I've been resistant to starting with Ruby/Rails for the reason I described. Thanks!
  - hamandcheese 9y ago
    I don’t do machine learning or data science, so I’m assuming here, but I would imagine whatever you end up doing would be en entirely different service than your web stack and could be whatever language you wanted.
  - mod 9y ago
    Learning Ruby would give you a big leg up over starting from scratch learning Python. I don't know if you are familiar with any programming languages at all, but many skills translate cross-language...the paradigms are the same. Particularly with Ruby & Python which are very similar languages. They're good at the same things, by and large. Taking your Ruby skills over to Python will be a matter of "google: [python thing] in ruby". For a specific example, Python has a unique thing called "list comprehensions". Using that google string you can get some great ideas about replicating that functionality in Ruby. Anyway, on a grander scale, picking up new languages is the easy part of programming--even when they're not so similar. Best of luck!

eximius 9y ago

No. What does rails have that a different python framework doesn't have? And you'll save yourself the tears of migrating later.

danmaz74 9y ago
Why would you need to migrate to Python later? I can understand needing to migrate to something more performant/easy to scale, but Python doesn't have any advantage on Ruby in that department.
- eximius 9y ago
  Not migrate to python, migration away from Rails. I'm suggesting Python as an alternative to Rails to start with.
  - danmaz74 9y ago
    You still didn't answer why would I want to migrate away from Rails. Python has no advantage I can think of (unless one has to work with data analysis).
    - eximius 9y ago
      My experience is admittedly tainted because we migrated away from a Rails codebase and it was not fun. The Rails code was extremely convoluted and encourages metaprogramming in a way that is very un-typed. Basically, I think Rails is inferior because it encourages bad practices, has no distinct advantages over Python, Python seems to have a larger talent pool, and Python has uses outside of Rails that make it a better choice for a one-language shop (i.e., your tools can be in the same language as your code and can utilize that + Python is everywhere, Ruby has extra devops costs incurred). I won't say you can't be successful with Ruby. That'd be silly. But do I think there is a reason to choose Rails over Python if you can start fresh? Nope.

joshfng 9y ago

Absolutely. If you're building a POC or MVP it's a quick and easy way to get something off the ground. The framework will take you pretty far before you have scaling issues (long enough to know if what you're making is worth it). The community is very knowledgeable and friendly, and gems for almost everything already exist. If I needed to spin up a new project and get to work right away on something I'd go with rails no question. I've yet to find another language/framework combo that works as well as a Ruby & Rails stack (Laravel and Django are good alternatives too, I'm just more experienced with Ruby). Don't think too far ahead. Premature optimization or thinking about future scaling issues if starting a new project is time that could be spent better. Rails isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

Techbrunch 9y ago

Pretty sure that this Quora answer from DHH is still valid in 2018: https://www.quora.com/What-makes-Rails-a-framework-worth-learning-in-2017 https://www.quora.com/What-makes-Rails-a-framework-worth-lea...

Iwan-Zotow 9y ago

dang 9y ago
Could you please not post unsubstantive comments to HN? We're trying for a higher standard here. If you'd take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html and follow the spirit of the site, we'd appreciate it.

sb8244 9y ago

Yes, Rails helps developers make good upfront choices to the structuring of their application and database. The DB layer and structure is going to be a bottleneck well before the programming framework is (I think this is true in any framework). I enjoy that Rails makes it easy to do things like take care of N+1 queries, do associations correctly, etc. That isn't exclusive to Rails, but it is really good in Rails.

mmartinson 9y ago
I think Rails helps developers make ok choices to the structuring of their application, particular if it's serving a domain that models easily into a fairly conventional RESTish-API relational data structure. The strongly-held conventions (in both framework and community) that position it so well for upfront productivity don't leave a ton of space for taking a proactive approach to managing complexity in a trickier domain. Smart, experienced people can of course identify where the framework leaves off and build within the confines of Rails to get things done. But I wouldn't say that Rails makes it particularly easy to, for example, use a object-oriented approach the the model layer. ActiveRecord, with its lovely but dangerous APIs, really wants to be your everything class. Domain namespacing, while doable (you can do anything in Ruby), isn't particularly intuitive compared to other parts of the framework. None of this is to say that Rails is a bad tool and I'm grateful for what it's provided (thank you OSS maintainers). It does, however, trade medium-term maintainability for the up-front productivity it offers, which could be totally fine, but for me doesn't feel like a great trade.
- sb8244 9y ago
  A tool in the hands of an expert will be used differently than a non expert. The model layer that AR suggests might not be good for an expert, but it will certainly help a non expert build their app for some time without too severe of issues. You are right that it's far from perfect and it really is a "be everything" ORM.

Zyst 9y ago

From someone who doesn't use Rails day-to-day: It's still about as relevant as it used to be before, for the same reasons it was relevant then. In summary: If you need to get shit done fast, it's a good bet. It isn't as hyped as it used to be 5 or so years ago, and if hype cycles are relevant to you, you likely already know your answer. As to whether you are asking whether learning it would make you unemployable, by no means. RoR is still going strong, at least in my country.

benehmke 9y ago

It’s so fast to spin up, deploy, and iterate on a rails app it’s insane. As stated, it depends on your context and your goals, but if speed matters to you, it’s hard to say rails is not a top solution.

1as 9y ago

Yes. Rails has by now certainly crossed into boring software territory – arguably a [positive thing](http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology) anyway – but it remains an excellent choice coming into 2018: - Out of the box, Rails has close to unbeatable developer ergonomics, tooling, stability, and ease of use - Lots of high quality, large companies use it (GitHub, Shopify, Airbnb, Square, Twitch) and have by now figured out how to scale it, often sharing and open sourcing their efforts, e.g. https://github.com/Shopify/identity_cache https://github.com/Shopify/identity_cache - If your product front end is simple, Turbolinks can be an excellent choice (find me a faster, more bug free product than Basecamp) - If you prefer to use a more modern JavaScript solution on the front end like Ember or React, Rails API is a perfect fit - The Ruby ecosystem and community are both very high quality

foodstances 9y ago
Boring yet still very volatile. I wonder if or when Rails will settle down and stop changing everything between major releases causing all documentation to be out of date, gems to break, developer habits to break, etc. Not to mention all of the related tooling like Bundler which seems to spit out new and uninteresting warnings and errors every time I update it. It would be great to be able to write an application using a framework and not have to constantly change the application just to get long-term updates to the framework like bug fixes, security patches, compatibility with new versions of Ruby, etc. Basically Rails-LTS but not from a 3rd-party (and embraced by the ecosystem).
- jeffnappi 9y ago
  Volatile in comparison to what exactly?
  - true_religion 9y ago
    In comparison to Python, where things just work for years without being touched. Upgrading can get you a better api or performance for a specific workload but rarely will it be necessary.

stevebmark 9y ago

Much of what you learn in Ruby and Rails is not portable to other languages. Ruby and Rails are deeply flawed and much of what you learn is dealing with those flaws. Similar to learning PHP for example (but differently flawed than PHP). Ruby is also showing its age and is lagging behind modern languages. Rails is probably fine and fast and good for small projects. It is probably not good for professional large projects.

aaronbrethorst 9y ago
You should let AirBnb and GitHub know.
- stevebmark 9y ago
  Oh, believe me, they know
  - mmartinson 9y ago
    Hahaha
Finnucane 9y ago
There should be a Hacker News MadLibs form: UserOne: Don't use [insert language] and [insert framework] because [bad design flaw] and doesn't scale. UserTwo: But [BigCo with millions of users].
mrgordon 9y ago
What web dev languages/frameworks aren’t deeply flawed and teach you more portable skills?
- stevebmark 9y ago
  Unfortunately I would say Javascript. Unlike Ruby, you will learn about compilers, static analysis, linting (eslint is more useful than rubocop), type systems, function composition, and have a good alternative to OO based programing built into the language (as opposed to your `UnboundMethod` lambda block proc whateverthehell design flaw Ruby has now). Javascript also gives you decent jumping off points into languages you will learn more from (Elm, Purescript).

abritinthebay 9y ago

There’s nothing wrong with Rails in 2018. It’s maybe not the most forward-looking choice you could make but it’ll get you running quickly. But if you have a smart team and a little bit of time for ramping up then I’d suggest Elixir+Phoenix or Node tbh. Rails is good at what it’s designed to be - a one stop shop for fast to develop, kinda dirty, framework magic, webdev. And there is nothing wrong with that.

danmaz74 9y ago
Node with which framework? By itself it's not comparable to Rails.
- abritinthebay 9y ago
  True! Though I actually think that’s a good thing (imo too much magic & abstraction in a framework leads to bad app design because too much is hidden). But that sort of reinforces the point I was making tbh. Want something that makes all those choice for you? Right or wrong? Rails. Nothing wrong with that as such, but it will cause issues eventually.

sandGorgon 9y ago

It depends on whether or not you are on the React bandwagon. Yes Rails does work with React - but this means two different asset pipelines (Rails and React/Node). If I was building a product focused stack, then I would simply do React+ Typescript. Why bother bringing in two different languages for front end and backend ? Typescript is pretty awesome in itself.

danmaz74 9y ago

I've yet to find anything that comes close to Rails in programmer productivity for the web. So, as long as programmer productivity is a concern, it's relevant. EDIT: On the other hand, I wouldn't choose Rails for a project where the main concern is performance/scalability

ComputerGuru 9y ago
Try ASP.NET. It’s managed to take learn most of the lessons (what to avoid and what to replicate) from RoR and is built around a better language (C# or others of your choice) and environment (Visual Studio and MSDN) to boot. Now that .NET with .NET Core is officially a first-class citizen on Linux, there really no good reason not to embrace it.
- cutler 9y ago
  Except that Visual Studio 2017 is a dog, especially on Windows 10.

FBISurveillance 9y ago

Ruby on Rails is a great bet for those who need to kickstart fast. When Ruby/Rails becomes a performance bottleneck you're probably already making tens of millions and have dozens of people to diversify your tech stack. Core team takes care of many things like webpack, ActiveStorage, etc for you, many thanks to folks. I've been doing Ruby on Rails since 0.19 as far as I remember and it's been great ever since. Not that hyped anymore but who cares about hype when you get your shit done. Also as you grow, you appreciate talent availability when it comes to Ruby/Rails.

yedpodtrzitko 9y ago

I'm not Rubyist, but when I see an article about RoR it's one of these: "I just started using Ruby and omg it's out-of-box everything, rapid development, monkeypatching makes everything super easy, it's like second Jesus coming." and the second category is this: "I am working with RoR for years, maintaining/migrating anything is super painful, because everyone is monkeypatching everything, so you cant safely touch anything." Choose wisely.

mrgordon 9y ago
Maybe this says something about the article writers? Most Rails applications I see have minimal monkeypatching and I can’t remember the last time I had to debug an issue related to one. On the contrary, monkeypatching is most often used to fix issues in libraries that would otherwise require forking or pushing changes upstream to the project to fix. For example, Rails 3.2 is missing a few time duration methods from Rails 4 which Ruby 2.4 relies on so you need to add those via monkeypatch to run Ruby 2.4 with the legacy Rails version if you can’t upgrade everything at once.
jeffnappi 9y ago
The second category there is typically people who adopted Rails and then ignored it's culture of testing. One thing about Ruby is that you better have good test coverage if you ever want to be able to safely upgrade your dependencies.
dizzystar 9y ago
gem install hairball

matte_black 9y ago

If you already know Rails, yes. If you are thinking about learning Rails now, probably not. Yes Rails is great for MVPs, but then so are a lot of other things, like Meteor.

kapauldo 9y ago
What would you suggest if you don't know rails?
- mmartinson 9y ago
  I would suggest Elixir/Phoenix if your priority is maintaining and scaling a business application. I would offer that suggestion with caution, though, if you're considering building a core skill set for employability today. A small contingent of the experienced Ruby community have become fervent Elixir evangelists, but the number of successful projects, jobs and skilled candidates is a miniscule fraction of Ruby and other mainstream choices.
  - cutler 9y ago
    Yes, here in London Elixir jobs are still very thin on the ground. I don't see Elixir moving beyond its current position in the job market. It has everything - great concurrency, Phoenix - except mindshare and adoption. In another era, with less competition I would have bet on Elixir but not today.
techeigh 9y ago
Would you still recommend Rails if the person has absolutely zero Ruby/Javascript knowledge (but functioning HTML/CSS)?

thegabez 9y ago

Still one of the best, if not best, choices for building a CRUD web app. I don't see this changing any time soon.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Shicholas 9y ago

No. Long time rails developer, but if you can green-light a project I'd highly recommend node all the way. I've found it much easier to comprehend a pure javascript stack (or even better an all-Typescript stack) due to substantially less cognitive overhead, find other people to work with (very important as your project scales), and the fact I can deploy node with a serverless implementation on Azure, GCP, and AWS makes it a home run when it comes to security and devops costs (and the need for devops in general). While rails has a bunch of great features, those features (rightfully) have been copied elsewhere, e.g. Active Record, which has a fantastic javascript implementation - TypeORM. Finally, when it comes to interface development, nothing in rails will get you as far as React these days, especially as the web moves mobile, and into AR/VR, which IMO present the next challenges of interface development. And like rails, nearly every question related to React/Node is answered on Stack Overflow or has a well-documented library to solve that use case.

wgjordan 9y ago
> Finally, when it comes to interface development, nothing in rails will get you as far as React these days Rails's out-of-the-box React integration [1] should get you _exactly_ as far as React these days. [1] https://github.com/rails/webpacker#react https://github.com/rails/webpacker#react
- Shicholas 9y ago
  While this is interesting, you're proposing a monolithic repo with two predominant languages. I think it's much harder to get the benefits of riding the NPM wave while the front-end is stuck in a rails project such as using Typescript, React Native, etc. These are all possible of course, but there's a Rails Webpacker library that's an extra intermediary between the author and their JS code.
anko 9y ago
It seems like you're comparing a framework with a language? What framework do you use on node.js? My experience with nodejs has been pretty poor. I'll give some examples; * The language and runtime is constantly updating - there is no such thing as stability * Even npm couldn't produce deterministic installs until this year * npm dependency hell * there are lots of ways to do any task, so there is much fragmentation with advice / community * the repls in node suck compared to pry * I can't find a good opinionated framework - so everyone lays out each application differently, with different standards etc. That means you end up spending a ridiculous amount of time configuring everything. * most apps i've needed to make don't actually benefit from being a SPA. It's a cargo cult thing. * javascript as a language sucks!

_d8fd 9y ago

Speaking for myself, and I tend to make practical choices for what I understand now. At the moment, I am not using Rails in my day to day work, and this is largely based on my past experiences. Pros: - easy enough to find libraries for most things I wanna do - community likes testing, as do I - community seems to focus on business & web implementations, so good for those use cases - lots of questions for which I want answers already answered - package management - deployment to PaaS/Herorku-ish platforms pretty easy for smaller teams - here in San Francisco, there are lots of job opportunities for Rails developers - I like Ruby, even though I am less excited about OOP these days Cons: - Rails is magical & opinionated, and that always annoys me - Figuring out where some method is coming from in a Rails object is often a pain - In Elixir I almost never need a debugger, but in Ruby I almost always do - loading Rails apps can get really slow, and learning to wait for software to boot isn't a skill I like to develop - I feel more pressure "to do it" right when the time "to do it right" simply doesn't exist for reasons, because trying to come back and refactor gnarly Ruby code is just harder than it is in a compiled language - Ruby has to be installed on the system to which an app is deployed, and needing to think about how to pre-install Ruby or how long a Ruby install takes is a mild pain (stand alone Go binaries or Elixir releases are pretty sweet)

mmartinson 9y ago
I feel like figuring out where a method is coming from to be a routine source of tedium and a massive gumption trap when working on Ruby projects. This, along with bugs rooted in hidden state mutations, far overshadows the time saving conveniences in Ruby and Rails for me.
- amorphid 9y ago
  When I have creative freedom, I use Rails for routing, serving requests, and talking to the DB. I try to not to lean too heavily on Rails for business logic stuff.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

drny 9y ago

Yes. I have used rails since about 0.6 and evaluated other frameworks since. Nothing comes close for me, especially for CRUD apps. For anything complicated (50+ models), things can begin to feel unwieldy but it helps to be disciplined about how you structure your code. I find trailblazer very useful in that regard. I've recently started to learn vue.js and it's making JavaScript a pleasure to use alongside rails. I think my future projects will be vue + rails by default

jgalvez 9y ago

No.

thebiglebrewski 9y ago

Yes! The Rails core is quite stable and the community continues to innovate. I've recently gotten very involved with Devise Token Auth, an open source project that helps you use Devise on apps that do auth on the client side, like those written in Vue and React. We're on the hunt for new contributors: https://github.com/lynndylanhurley/devise_token_auth https://github.com/lynndylanhurley/devise_token_auth