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I've worked on many Rails apps that are still out there in critical spots. My gut feel is it has stabilized. The hype was well-founded; it allows dev velocity t

I've worked on many Rails apps that are still out there in critical spots. My gut feel is it has stabilized. The hype was well-founded; it allows dev velocity that I still haven't seen in any other environment. I once worked on the integration of an existing Rails app into an existing C# webapp (both living side-by-side, kind of a split-application thing, but seamless to the end user). It was almost hilarious how many LOC the C# teams (!) were having to write for every LOC I (alone) was writing in Rails. Looking through their diffs, it seemed like they were reinventing fire compared to me writing `render :success if SomeModel.update(model_params)`.

neonsunset 2y ago
It speaks more about the unfortunate state of practice in the team in question. C# itself is of similar terseness when compared to Ruby, with 10x to 20x better performance so even when written in a bulkier way, it becomes less relevant as you are not going to hold, say, C or C++ against similar criticism in such context. Oh, also no method not found thing too. C# has much greater likelihood of not having defects when you do deploy it.
- frostymarvelous 2y ago
  I'd say this speaks more to the metaprogramming capabilities of rails rather than the team itself. Rails simply does more for you out the box with just a few macros.
  - neonsunset 2y ago
    Do you have a specific example in mind?
    - pantulis 2y ago
      I think what parent said is referring to stuff like https://github.com/mbleigh/acts-as-taggable-on https://github.com/mbleigh/acts-as-taggable-on It's not only that RoR comes with a complete toolset -- it allows you to create your own libraries that extend the capabilities of the framework while keeping the developer experience terse enough through metaprogramming (compare the sample code in the README with the file acts-as-taggable-on/lib/acts-as-taggable-on/taggable.rb, where you can see how the library is opening the classes in runtime through the class_eval technique. I'm sure something similar can be achieved in C# but not so sure about the elegance of the result.
      - neonsunset 2y ago
        I read through the description. Funnily enough, it's a second time I ask a question "what does Ruby have?" and the response provides something very specific to Ruby that does not idiomatically translate to other languages in a way that someone in polyglot environment would immediately understand a need for. Statically typed languages usually have other, better ways, to associate metadata with the types, if necessary. Or avoid having such a requirement at all. > For instance, in a social network, a user might have tags that are called skills, interests, sports, and more. There is no real way to differentiate between tags and so an implementation of this type is not possible with acts as taggable on steroids. Isn't that's just having a property/field on a struct/class/type/object that contains the list of tags? Active Records seem to be effectively EF Core's tracked entities but with seemingly more "magic" under the hood (something that ORMs are often criticized for, including catching undeserved strays by EFC). In general, I remain very negative towards Ruby and Ruby on Rails because most feedback that I hear leaves an impression of "so it has some of the advantages similar to top modern web frameworks in C# and Java/Kotlin but with a huge bag of breakage risk with codebase growth, a need to extensively cover code with tests and static analysis to cover for mistakes that are impossible in statically typed languages, and one tenth of performance on a sunny day". Now, I don't think it's a bad choice in a vacuum, but it's important to consider the overall experience and practices used in a language A vs B, and whether either is used correctly.
        Tainnor 2y ago
        As someone who started his career writing Ruby (but has since migrated to statically typed languages), I agree with your criticism. One big problem I had with the Rails community was the overemphasis on libraries/frameworks that make the code superficially look nice ("just put this dependency in your Gemfile, and it will automagically work") but aren't actually well-designed enough to be composable. The moment you're gonna have to do something out of the happy path, you're often out of luck. The tagging problem in particular isn't such a hard problem that you' should need to pull in an extra dependency just for that. It's basically just a nested set of hash maps, the "hardest" part about it is the persistence - and I do believe it's worth spending maybe 2 hours on a proper DB schema in exchange for having code you own and understand. There are other libraries in the Ruby ecosystem that take different approaches (dry.rb for example, which IMHO, strikes a better balance between the expressivity of Ruby and solid design), but they're not all that popular.
- wiseowise 2y ago
  > C# itself is of similar terseness when compared to Ruby, with 10x to 20x better performance so even when written in a bulkier way More like 50-100x.
  - neonsunset 2y ago
    It is true and you have to lack technical knowledge to downvote this. In regular "line of business" code this difference might be a bit difficult to see in between the calls waiting for DB and third-party dependencies, so I went with more conservative numbers. On the more complex code this difference will be totally observable.
- rogerrogerr 2y ago
  No question; I can write far more performant C# code than I can Ruby. For this set of teams, at least, their code wasn’t very performant because it took 3 months to get from Jira ticket to production. They were always getting themselves tied into knots about how to handle rollbacks across their nine microservices required to change a birthday. Meanwhile, I’m in my corner with my nice little monolith that could read data from their database easier than they could read it.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

neonsunset 2y ago

It speaks more about the unfortunate state of practice in the team in question. C# itself is of similar terseness when compared to Ruby, with 10x to 20x better performance so even when written in a bulkier way, it becomes less relevant as you are not going to hold, say, C or C++ against similar criticism in such context. Oh, also no method not found thing too. C# has much greater likelihood of not having defects when you do deploy it.

frostymarvelous 2y ago
I'd say this speaks more to the metaprogramming capabilities of rails rather than the team itself. Rails simply does more for you out the box with just a few macros.
- neonsunset 2y ago
  Do you have a specific example in mind?
  - pantulis 2y ago
    I think what parent said is referring to stuff like https://github.com/mbleigh/acts-as-taggable-on https://github.com/mbleigh/acts-as-taggable-on It's not only that RoR comes with a complete toolset -- it allows you to create your own libraries that extend the capabilities of the framework while keeping the developer experience terse enough through metaprogramming (compare the sample code in the README with the file acts-as-taggable-on/lib/acts-as-taggable-on/taggable.rb, where you can see how the library is opening the classes in runtime through the class_eval technique. I'm sure something similar can be achieved in C# but not so sure about the elegance of the result.
    - neonsunset 2y ago
      I read through the description. Funnily enough, it's a second time I ask a question "what does Ruby have?" and the response provides something very specific to Ruby that does not idiomatically translate to other languages in a way that someone in polyglot environment would immediately understand a need for. Statically typed languages usually have other, better ways, to associate metadata with the types, if necessary. Or avoid having such a requirement at all. > For instance, in a social network, a user might have tags that are called skills, interests, sports, and more. There is no real way to differentiate between tags and so an implementation of this type is not possible with acts as taggable on steroids. Isn't that's just having a property/field on a struct/class/type/object that contains the list of tags? Active Records seem to be effectively EF Core's tracked entities but with seemingly more "magic" under the hood (something that ORMs are often criticized for, including catching undeserved strays by EFC). In general, I remain very negative towards Ruby and Ruby on Rails because most feedback that I hear leaves an impression of "so it has some of the advantages similar to top modern web frameworks in C# and Java/Kotlin but with a huge bag of breakage risk with codebase growth, a need to extensively cover code with tests and static analysis to cover for mistakes that are impossible in statically typed languages, and one tenth of performance on a sunny day". Now, I don't think it's a bad choice in a vacuum, but it's important to consider the overall experience and practices used in a language A vs B, and whether either is used correctly.
      - Tainnor 2y ago
        As someone who started his career writing Ruby (but has since migrated to statically typed languages), I agree with your criticism. One big problem I had with the Rails community was the overemphasis on libraries/frameworks that make the code superficially look nice ("just put this dependency in your Gemfile, and it will automagically work") but aren't actually well-designed enough to be composable. The moment you're gonna have to do something out of the happy path, you're often out of luck. The tagging problem in particular isn't such a hard problem that you' should need to pull in an extra dependency just for that. It's basically just a nested set of hash maps, the "hardest" part about it is the persistence - and I do believe it's worth spending maybe 2 hours on a proper DB schema in exchange for having code you own and understand. There are other libraries in the Ruby ecosystem that take different approaches (dry.rb for example, which IMHO, strikes a better balance between the expressivity of Ruby and solid design), but they're not all that popular.
wiseowise 2y ago
> C# itself is of similar terseness when compared to Ruby, with 10x to 20x better performance so even when written in a bulkier way More like 50-100x.
- neonsunset 2y ago
  It is true and you have to lack technical knowledge to downvote this. In regular "line of business" code this difference might be a bit difficult to see in between the calls waiting for DB and third-party dependencies, so I went with more conservative numbers. On the more complex code this difference will be totally observable.
rogerrogerr 2y ago
No question; I can write far more performant C# code than I can Ruby. For this set of teams, at least, their code wasn’t very performant because it took 3 months to get from Jira ticket to production. They were always getting themselves tied into knots about how to handle rollbacks across their nine microservices required to change a birthday. Meanwhile, I’m in my corner with my nice little monolith that could read data from their database easier than they could read it.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]