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Rails is very productive but it has problems of its own. Many companies move away from Rails once they reach certain growth milestones. Erlang (and by extensio

Rails is very productive but it has problems of its own. Many companies move away from Rails once they reach certain growth milestones. Erlang (and by extension Elixir) is a concurrent language. You use it when you have non-trivial concurrency challenges. When tackling the right problems, the language shines. Implementing a simple CRUD application with Elixir is overkill, because you can make your servers stateless and delegate most of the concurrency problems to the database.

midrus 5y ago
In my personal experience (the last bunch of companies I've been at) that milestone you mention is more like what is the current fashion and what the new hires want to work on because of the latest blog post they've read. At my previous job we had *ALL* of them. Each service or project you opened you could guess the date it was started because of how it was built. Rails -> Node -> Elixir -> Go -> Next.js and the frontend backbone -> ember -> react (redux -> mobx -> rxjs -> [some other random state lib] -> just context! -> recoil) -> typescript and probably by now they're already using whatever the new trend is by this morning. It is insane. None of the companies needed any of the performance provided by this tools, in fact, they all struggle with developer productivity more than any other metric, and every time they switch to the new shiny toy, productivity takes another huge cut. But hey, people get paid anyway at the end of the month, so let's keep playing.
- joelbluminator 5y ago
  The CTO should be fired, what the hell. In fact maybe we should start naming the companies (not the CTOs I will respect their privacy) so we can know where NOT to work.
- 29athrowaway 5y ago
  Next.js is node-based.
joelbluminator 5y ago
I really don't see any reason to move from Rails other than a new CTO trying to shake things up with a tech he's more familiar with. If Shopify/Github/Gitlab/ can build it on Rails so can you. If the monolith is too big you can break it down with engines or to separate apps. Now I like Rails but I would say the same about PHP/Node or most popular stacks. Rewrites to another language are almost always unnecessary.
- 29athrowaway 5y ago
  For many years Github ran on a fork of Ruby and a fork of Rails. Recently they upgraded to Ruby 2.7 and that's what they use now. https://github.blog/2020-08-25-upgrading-github-to-ruby-2-7/ https://github.blog/2020-08-25-upgrading-github-to-ruby-2-7/
  - joelbluminator 5y ago
    It says right in your link "Many years ago, we ran GitHub on a fork of Ruby (and Rails!) and while that hasn’t been the case for some time". So that was a long time ago, what is your point?

midrus 5y ago

In my personal experience (the last bunch of companies I've been at) that milestone you mention is more like what is the current fashion and what the new hires want to work on because of the latest blog post they've read. At my previous job we had *ALL* of them. Each service or project you opened you could guess the date it was started because of how it was built. Rails -> Node -> Elixir -> Go -> Next.js and the frontend backbone -> ember -> react (redux -> mobx -> rxjs -> [some other random state lib] -> just context! -> recoil) -> typescript and probably by now they're already using whatever the new trend is by this morning. It is insane. None of the companies needed any of the performance provided by this tools, in fact, they all struggle with developer productivity more than any other metric, and every time they switch to the new shiny toy, productivity takes another huge cut. But hey, people get paid anyway at the end of the month, so let's keep playing.

joelbluminator 5y ago
The CTO should be fired, what the hell. In fact maybe we should start naming the companies (not the CTOs I will respect their privacy) so we can know where NOT to work.
29athrowaway 5y ago
Next.js is node-based.

joelbluminator 5y ago

I really don't see any reason to move from Rails other than a new CTO trying to shake things up with a tech he's more familiar with. If Shopify/Github/Gitlab/ can build it on Rails so can you. If the monolith is too big you can break it down with engines or to separate apps. Now I like Rails but I would say the same about PHP/Node or most popular stacks. Rewrites to another language are almost always unnecessary.

29athrowaway 5y ago
For many years Github ran on a fork of Ruby and a fork of Rails. Recently they upgraded to Ruby 2.7 and that's what they use now. https://github.blog/2020-08-25-upgrading-github-to-ruby-2-7/ https://github.blog/2020-08-25-upgrading-github-to-ruby-2-7/
- joelbluminator 5y ago
  It says right in your link "Many years ago, we ran GitHub on a fork of Ruby (and Rails!) and while that hasn’t been the case for some time". So that was a long time ago, what is your point?