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The funniest part about the enthusiasm for React masochism is that the best parts of the library are better accomplished with a combination of Turbolinks 5 and

The funniest part about the enthusiasm for React masochism is that the best parts of the library are better accomplished with a combination of Turbolinks 5 and Stimulus. Not a coincidence that they're all Rails extractions. For me, the more interesting question in all of this is where did this fervour for JS-and-the-way-down actually come from? My hypothesis is that it's the natural result of a huge mess of new talent - fresh out of various overpriced Bootcamps and told that their 9-week educations give them a credible opinion in true post-modernist fashion - all being released on the world at the precise moment that a predictable police lineup of over-promised technologies were all at the top of their respective hype cycles. Humans have a predictable tendency to assume that the thing they are thinking about at the moment is far more important than it actually is. If you have a very short institutional memory and everyone you know in your bubble has been programming for a relatively short period of time, pretty soon you can start to believe that if everyone is doing it, you couldn't all be wrong.

tomc1985 8y ago
I think it's that, and the general accessibility of Javascript. Before this JS craze you saw the same shit with PHP and Visual Basic, though for the most part people weren't trying to build and rebuild the same platforms nearly as much as now
- peteforde 8y ago
  I know that it's 2008 calling, but seriously: when did Heroku, Github and the bundler/gem ecosystem stop qualifying as accessible? Deploying an MVP Rails app with sophisticated functionality is so effective that it still qualifies as erotic. For me, the most compelling example of progress coming from the JS camp was my shallow investigation of the Expo platform for React Native. It has some genuinely sexy developer ergonomics features which I'd love to see make their way back into Rails.
  - tim333 8y ago
    I've been trying to learn some Rails and it's not that simple. People tend to say just read Hartl which is 804 pages according to Amazon. It may seem simple once you are familiar with a few dozen gems, action this, active that but there are a lot of bits to learn about.
    - joelbluminator 8y ago
      True, any 15 year old framework will have bloat. But Rails is absolutely skinny compared to Spring, ASP and fellows. Its probably easier than a MEAN stack also.
    - digitaltrees 8y ago
      That book is long, not because rails is bloated, but because there are very in depth sections building things from scratch like authentication that in practice are solved by gems. They are important for beginners to learn but are rarely reimplement from scratch in rails projects.
    - peteforde 8y ago
      I'd like to formally extend an open offer to help you or anyone else reading this to contact me for help if you're stuck learning Rails. Just reply with an email or some other mechanism and I'll follow up. If you have questions about best practices or you're just stuck on something, hit me up. Hartl is great, has his/its place etc. Sometimes you just need a smart person with experience to add personal context. Happy to be of service.
      - aboutruby 8y ago
        Hi, if you are interested in helping people with their ruby/rails issues, there is also reddit / ruby discord / rails slack / and stack overflow. I'm trying to be active on Reddit and the Discord but not very active on slack/stack overflow. There are already quite a few people helping but more people would help :).
        tim333 8y ago
hombre_fatal 8y ago
What purpose does it serve to take such an uncharitable view on other people? This community is full of experienced professionals who use Javascript even in the face of alternative options, and we belabor this topic every day. So what excuse do you have for assuming and hypothesizing that everyone must be an unenlightened boot camp amateur when you could've turned to anyone and simply asked? For example, to me, modern JS is not substantially worse than other dynamically typed languages. Give me Python and Ruby code and the Javascript version probably looks the exact same. Meanwhile, those languages don't have a 1:1 version of `results = await Promise.map(urls, (url) => crawl(url), { concurrency: 8 })`. And that's not to start a language war but rather to demonstrate a concise example of a technical strength, aka a purely technical ground that a craftsperson could reach for that tool. But now fold in its advantages like ubiquity, async-everything, runs natively in the browser, and has a static-typing system that's actually catching on, and it should be pretty obvious why someone could pick it when given an option beyond "they don't know any better." Also, there's the obvious trade-off of treating your server as the API for all of your clients and treating the web as just another client that runs on the user's device instead of essentially coupling it with the server. But surely these things are obvious or easy to find out, so it's hard to assume good faith in your post.
- goatlover 8y ago
  All that's nice at the language level in favor of JS, but it doesn't speak to the framework level of what all Rails offers compared to everything additional you need to add to React to be comparable. Same deal for some of the frameworks in PHP like Laravel or Drupal.
  - hombre_fatal 8y ago
    Comparing React vs Rails is like comparing an iOS app to Rails. I don't really see the point since they are fundamentally different, and whether your application should run on the client or not is a bedrock decision long before you get to "React vs Rails". Rails isn't even an option in one of the branches of that decision. I assume you meant to instead draw a distinction between a large framework like Rails and a tiny one like Sinatra. And I'd say that ranges from a matter of taste to the composition of your team more than anything else. Obviously there are upsides and downsides to any point you can mark on the continuum.

tomc1985 8y ago

I think it's that, and the general accessibility of Javascript. Before this JS craze you saw the same shit with PHP and Visual Basic, though for the most part people weren't trying to build and rebuild the same platforms nearly as much as now

peteforde 8y ago
I know that it's 2008 calling, but seriously: when did Heroku, Github and the bundler/gem ecosystem stop qualifying as accessible? Deploying an MVP Rails app with sophisticated functionality is so effective that it still qualifies as erotic. For me, the most compelling example of progress coming from the JS camp was my shallow investigation of the Expo platform for React Native. It has some genuinely sexy developer ergonomics features which I'd love to see make their way back into Rails.
- tim333 8y ago
  I've been trying to learn some Rails and it's not that simple. People tend to say just read Hartl which is 804 pages according to Amazon. It may seem simple once you are familiar with a few dozen gems, action this, active that but there are a lot of bits to learn about.
  - joelbluminator 8y ago
    True, any 15 year old framework will have bloat. But Rails is absolutely skinny compared to Spring, ASP and fellows. Its probably easier than a MEAN stack also.
  - digitaltrees 8y ago
    That book is long, not because rails is bloated, but because there are very in depth sections building things from scratch like authentication that in practice are solved by gems. They are important for beginners to learn but are rarely reimplement from scratch in rails projects.
  - peteforde 8y ago
    I'd like to formally extend an open offer to help you or anyone else reading this to contact me for help if you're stuck learning Rails. Just reply with an email or some other mechanism and I'll follow up. If you have questions about best practices or you're just stuck on something, hit me up. Hartl is great, has his/its place etc. Sometimes you just need a smart person with experience to add personal context. Happy to be of service.
    - aboutruby 8y ago
      Hi, if you are interested in helping people with their ruby/rails issues, there is also reddit / ruby discord / rails slack / and stack overflow. I'm trying to be active on Reddit and the Discord but not very active on slack/stack overflow. There are already quite a few people helping but more people would help :).
      - tim333 8y ago

hombre_fatal 8y ago

What purpose does it serve to take such an uncharitable view on other people? This community is full of experienced professionals who use Javascript even in the face of alternative options, and we belabor this topic every day. So what excuse do you have for assuming and hypothesizing that everyone must be an unenlightened boot camp amateur when you could've turned to anyone and simply asked? For example, to me, modern JS is not substantially worse than other dynamically typed languages. Give me Python and Ruby code and the Javascript version probably looks the exact same. Meanwhile, those languages don't have a 1:1 version of `results = await Promise.map(urls, (url) => crawl(url), { concurrency: 8 })`. And that's not to start a language war but rather to demonstrate a concise example of a technical strength, aka a purely technical ground that a craftsperson could reach for that tool. But now fold in its advantages like ubiquity, async-everything, runs natively in the browser, and has a static-typing system that's actually catching on, and it should be pretty obvious why someone could pick it when given an option beyond "they don't know any better." Also, there's the obvious trade-off of treating your server as the API for all of your clients and treating the web as just another client that runs on the user's device instead of essentially coupling it with the server. But surely these things are obvious or easy to find out, so it's hard to assume good faith in your post.

goatlover 8y ago
All that's nice at the language level in favor of JS, but it doesn't speak to the framework level of what all Rails offers compared to everything additional you need to add to React to be comparable. Same deal for some of the frameworks in PHP like Laravel or Drupal.
- hombre_fatal 8y ago
  Comparing React vs Rails is like comparing an iOS app to Rails. I don't really see the point since they are fundamentally different, and whether your application should run on the client or not is a bedrock decision long before you get to "React vs Rails". Rails isn't even an option in one of the branches of that decision. I assume you meant to instead draw a distinction between a large framework like Rails and a tiny one like Sinatra. And I'd say that ranges from a matter of taste to the composition of your team more than anything else. Obviously there are upsides and downsides to any point you can mark on the continuum.