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Why miss it, come on back, the water's still warm and the dev is still as fast as ever in Rails. Honestly, the JS stacks all seem vastly more annoying on so man
by ericb 8y ago
Why miss it, come on back, the water's still warm and the dev is still as fast as ever in Rails. Honestly, the JS stacks all seem vastly more annoying on so many levels.
It seems like the JS ecosystem changes so fast because it knows better is possible, so it just tries to reinvent itself over and over.
The JavaScript world starts with this weird prototype based language with a syntax that looks like it might be something more class based. From there it goes to dependency bundling hell, callback hell and Christmas tree code indenting, no standard implementation, and a library required for everything under the sun (Left-pad!) And somehow this is what the cool kids are into? I never liked Rails because it was "cool" I liked it because I love getting stuff done, fast.
- chanind 8y agoOddly I never considered starting a new project with it, but now I'm questioning why that is. I guess I just don't see many new projects started in Rails, and nowhere I've worked the past few years uses it. I stopped using it after Rails 3, but I'll give it a try again in the next side-project I work on and see how it goes.
- jacobsenscott 8y agoServer side rendered is still fantastic for the vast bulk of web apps. Turbolinks and a bit of care around performance and all you users know is you have a fast site. Not many apps really need the super rich SPA type experience.
- tomaskafka 8y agoThis. And it takes a LOT of work to emulate everything browsers give you for free on server side pages (caching, back button, reload to continue on connection loss ...)
- brightball 8y agoAnd you can take this approach to the next level with Phoenix LiveView that’s in its testing phase right now. Server rendering is so fast in Phoenix that it had a lot of people clamoring for a turbolinks-like solution to the problem. It’s not perfect yet, but as a first version is remarkably capable already.
- jacobsenscott 8y agoI heard someone on the ruby rouges podcast say they got turbolinks to work on Phoenix pretty easily.
- petepete 8y agoRails is used heavily even for new projects under the GOV.UK umbrella. The emphasis on accessibility and usability of government sites/applications weigh in favour of more-traditional stacks.
- herbst 8y agoAlso Bern.ch/be uses quite a few rails apps. (but also django and PHP)
- bunderbunder 8y ago> why that is We as a profession seem to be perennial victims of availability bias. We're naturally going to think of the stuff we've been reading about lately on the Internet first. Which is just never going to be the established and stable stuff that'll let you get your job done without producing any blog-worthy experiences in the process. "Went home after 8 hours without producing any fodder for war stories" doesn't make for an interesting tweet, let alone post on Medium.
- tomc1985 8y agoHonestly I have stopped trusting 'the herd' as a metric as it seems we programmers are more enticed by shiny things than practicality or excellence in engineering
- debuggerpk 8y agocoming from the django-world, i had the same complain with rails. It was a little too fast for a me.
- 0xADEADBEE 8y agoWould you mind expanding on this? I went from Django to Rails and loved it so I'm always genuinely curious about the experiences of people who didn't have the same fun as me.
- debuggerpk 8y agoIt was 4 years ago. I could never work rbenv and bundler to play nicely when cloning the project on the second machine. But I am willing to give it another go.
- baroffoos 8y agoI just updated a rails app through about 3 years worth of versions and it was minimal effort. Not sure what you mean by this. Rails seems to be very stable at this point.
- jrochkind1 8y agoRails is definitely way more stable over the past 3 years than it was the 3 years before that. It's settled down. For better or worse.
- baroffoos 8y agoThe last few versions added a bunch of really nice features but it seems the existing features are considered still good and not in need of change.
- ralusek 8y agoIf JavaScript is weird I have no idea what Ruby is. Callback hell and Christmas tree indenting have not been a part of JavaScript for many years since the wide adoption of promises, and now async/await. What makes it order of magnitudes more performant than Ruby is that it's non-blocking, and now comes with a very pleasant syntax to accommodate.
- ericb 8y ago> What makes it order of magnitudes more performant than Ruby Source for the "orders of magnitude" anywhere in the last year or so? Ruby with EventMachine outperformed Node significantly when I tested websocket chat servers.
- hombre_fatal 8y agoThough now you're in Event Machine world and can't use the rest of the ecosystem. One of the frequently overlooked properties of Javascript/Node is that it's async-everything. I'd be curious to hear more about this benchmark.
- toasterlovin 8y agoThis might come as a surprise, but async everything is not a feature for a lot of people. It’s a bug.
- hombre_fatal 8y agoYes, of course. Everything is a trade-off. Why the condescension? But there are almost zero async-everything options in the space. And being confined to a second-class async subworld inside a synchronous ecosystem is a classic error-prone challenge whether you're using Twisted, Event Machine, Tokio, or Netty. It's a pretty big downside of using Event Machine which even created its own networking primitives instead of using those in the Ruby stdlib.
- 8y ago
- ggregoire 8y ago> It seems like the JS ecosystem changes so fast Does it tho? React, Webpack, Babel and TypeScript have been around for a while now, and I can't think about anything else more recent that had a similar impact on the JS ecosystem.
- wzy 8y agoYeah, but I am quiet sure at least 12 new frontend frameworks were pushed to Github in the last 24 hours, plus 143+ NPM packages probably broke with the last Babel update
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ericb 8y agoVue? Yarn? Angular 2?
- baroffoos 8y agoAlmost half of my job is just updating these JS libraries because they reinvent everything or get replaced by other libraries constantly.
- acdha 8y agoAwhile back I converted a React app to pure JS after noticing that most of the commits for the last year had been updating as the slew of libraries it used had incompatible releases. The code size went down, performance went up, and you no longer needed a 300+MB toolchain just to load it.
- 52-6F-62 8y agoJS is not my first choice for many things but I still have to work with it often enough to know that most of your complaints about the language haven’t been a problem for years. It’s improved a great deal and is much better to work with lately—more so if you don’t install a library for everything under the sun (because you really don’t have to in order to be productive). There are valid complaints to levy against the ecosystem, but the ones you listed are non-issues if you take time to learn the language and VMs/environments themselves. To be fair, I mean.
- ericb 8y ago> complaints about the language haven’t been a problem for years. If we're being fair, what you say is true only if you are starting a greenfield project.
- 52-6F-62 8y agoYou could be right about that. I don't use scaffolding [if I can help it]—unless it's some I've set up and maintain myself (if I know I'm going to do a run of similar projects). Normally I only do greenfield projects as their architecture and maintainability are highest priority due to the need for longevity. Plus I often find those systems rather heavy-and not just in JS.