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zensavona

50% increase in development speed after making the switch from what?

I am certainly more productive in Ruby or more recently Elixir than JavaScript on either the client or server.

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RoR, apparently.

http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/10/4/linkedin-moved-fro...

The reason why Node.js cuts down on development times is due to the fact that you can have the same engineers working on both the frontend and backend - Basically it puts you in a situation where you can have a single engineer own a feature's development end-to-end.

When you have a company which is split up between frontend and backend teams, this requires your engineers to coordinate their work with one another and this reduces overall productivity (you usually need a lot of back-and-forth to bring the feature to completion).

Or you know, you could just hire developers who know more than one programming language.

Yeah, but that narrows down your pool of developers a lot. There are a lot more JavaScript developers than there are JavaScript developers who also happen know RoR.

I mean, sure, someone could learn RoR on the job, but in practice, will they actually do it? In all companies I worked for where the frontend and backend languages were different, developers tended to stick to one side of the fence. Developers just don't like context switching.

In my experience any developer worth hiring can do complex frontend work (even by 2015/2016 standards) and backend work. I've never seen a "frontend only" or "backend only" developer.

Did I say that Ruby on Rails was the only option?

On the other hand, if a developer cannot figure out Ruby on Rails (or Sinatra, or Django, or Flask, or any of the PHP frameworks), and does not even know SQL, do they really have any business doing server-side web development?

Knowing JavaScript and one server-side web app framework/language is a pretty minimal requirement for a full-stack web developer. It boggles my mind to think that there are people working as professional developers that literally only know JavaScript. Those people should not be doing server-side development.

It take longer to adopt and learn RoR than ES6. Both have their owns strength but Javascript and Python skills can be apply to any organizations, RoR is quite limited.

There are mature, production-ready server-side web app frameworks with relational database adapters in literally every mainstream programming language (and many of the obscure ones too) except for JavaScript. I didn't say you have to do Ruby on Rails. If you prefer Python, then you can just use Django, it is more or less equivalent to Rails.

More productive in the client-tier without using Javascript? I'd like to know how that works.

ClojureScript, Elm, etc.

zensavona was using ruby and elixir in the client side though? What does he do to be more productive using those? Any thoughts?

Edit: Unless he is only using helpers? Then I wonder how much power he can do with client side applications compared with modern javascript/typescript tools...

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