Hacker News Reader

Comment by shrugger | Hacker News Reader

40 points and no comments... Can we please discuss this?

I would like to know if this makes Rails worth learning for someone who knows Ruby but doesn't know rails. I have found my ruby knowledge to be less than marketable, and I want to step my game up. What do yall think?

View on HN

I'm a big Python evangelist for reasons lost to history, but even I would recommend learning Ruby on Rails if you want to make yourself marketable. I'm not sure how much of a market there is out there right now for people with Rails experience, but it never hurts to learn something new.

Besides, whether you chose to use Rails, or Sinatra, or move to some other language, as long as you are doing web development you'll be able to apply the concepts learned. So I say go for it!

I know a few other languages, they just aren't nearly as marketable as Ruby. I've learned Lua, Scheme, I know a little bit of Julia but most of the stdlib is over my head mathematically. I've fallen in love with Ruby because it seems to be how I 'think' about problems. I just never really had the motivation to learn Rails, I always hear people complaining about it, I've never needed a website or anything, I don't know. It just never happened.

Like the parent commenter, I'm also a huge fan of Python. I've recently started my journey learning web dev using Scala. It's a pretty hot language right now, what with the rise of big data and ML (see Spark for example). It allows you to use existing Java libraries, yet there still is a considerable number of high-quality libraries written in Scala. The stack I've chosen is Scala + Play + Slick, but there are several popular options.

You should look at Elixir/Phoenix - I think it's the next rails and will be the new hotness in a year or so :)

I'm personally a fan of Clojure which is an excellent language with excellent tooling and a smart and friendly community

+1 You should look at Elixir/Phoenix

Sincere question: Don't you feel the lack of static typing?

We've begun to use Elixir and Phoenix at work, and it's far nicer to work with than Rails - there's far less magic going on, and being functional, there is much less mutable state to keep in your head. That said, I still miss a rich type system. Typespecs can get you some of the way, but they're unreliable, and there's no support for parametrically polymorphic functions so far as I can see, which limits the usefulness of protocols for typechecking purposes.

Static typing is not a single issue. It is several.

From a high-level-language standpoint, static typing is a crutch. It isn't necessary, but it forces you to do things "the right way"... according to some definitions of the right way. It is possible to make mistakes without static typing that you would not make with it... but if you're careful you can also do some good things without it that you can't do with it. It all depends on whether you feel more comfortable with taking control or you feel the need for some restrictions to keep you "in line".

From a purely performance standpoint, there is no question: static typing compiles/interprets to faster code.

> From a high-level-language standpoint, static typing is a crutch

I see types as a high-level design tool. They allow me to reason about a domain, and figure out how to structure things at a high level before delving into the implementation. Yes, performance is a great side-benefit, but it is not always the driving factor.

I've put it on my list of things to learn - it looks great. Looks like a pleasure to write.

As someone who used to do (still do a bit) C and Ruby for embedded stuff but now does RoR for an ecommerce site, webdev can be a soul-crushing mind-numbing bore, but there are jobs and it pays. Rails is decent, especially if you are working on a site where server costs are not a significant factor in site costs. It is worth learning.

In germany there are like ten rails jobs.

Germany is mostly Java or heavy embedded stuff. I mean one of the biggest shop is probably Zalando which uses Java/Scala/Python. And as far as I know otto.de is on the JVM, too.

And from what I heard: PHP.

I find interesting how some countries (or rather, the industries in those countries) seem to specialize in certain stacks. Back when I lived in Brazil, Delphi used to be huge there, even though it had already kind of died everywhere else. Argentina seemed to be doing mostly Java. I guess it has to do with the kind of consulting companies that hire the bulk of the software engineers in the country.

It'd be great to get something like the TIOBE index, but split by country, although I guess I'd try to bias it a bit heavier towards commercially developed LOCs.

There's a huge Rails community in Berlin and hundreds of jobs. Not sure about the rest of the country.

Maybe that's how I hired three German developers working remotely for my SF/London based company?

I've noticed there seem to be a lot more remote Rails jobs than anything else (other than Javascript). I know some Ruby and am also thinking about Rails, despite my preference for Python- there just so few Python or Django remote jobs unfortunately I need to broaden my horizons.

The problem is that the maturity of the Rails market means that most Rails positions require X number of years experience - I can certainly pick up Rails but those years of experience have to come from somewhere.

EDIT: not entirely true, as there are a lot of PHP jobs. However these include bottom-feeder Wordpress gigs and generally pay much lower salaries than other languages, right or wrong.

From previous comments, it looks like you're in the UK? Ping me.

I really can't recommend Hartl's Rails Tutorial highly enough. https://www.railstutorial.org/book

It not only teaches you Rails, it teaches Github and Heroku and gets your first first web app deployed at the end of the first chapter. And, it's free!

There is also enormous hiring market for Rails developers.

I'm not sure about that. Search Indeed.co.uk's API (which removes duplicates) for - "Ruby" title:(Rails or RoR) - and you'll find 101 jobs listed in London. Repeat the search for United Kingdom and there are only 158. So 64% of Rails jobs are in London. Compare that with PHP - 2102 jobs in the UK, 672 of them in London and you find a more even distribution and a much higher number of jobs. Rails is still a niche framework and has never come anywhere near matching PHP's adoption despite all the hype.

I almost want to say thay this is an unfair comparison but that would also be unfair.

Nothing matches PHP adoption. It started 10 years before than Ruby and Python web frameworks and its runtime model is ideal for free hosting. That gave it mindshare and market share. It's still one of the ugliest languages even if it's slowly getting a face lift.

At the time its competitors where Java and Perl. Perl could have the same runtime model and was the first language for the web thanks to CGI.pm. PHP won because its simplicity and the commands embedded in the HTML page. Java is another world and only suited to corporate developers especially because there could be hardly a free Java hosting. Any of them now, not counting the AWS Lambda free tier?

Yeah, but what percentage of those PHP jobs involve customizing a Wordpress site? I personally wouldn't touch any of those with a ten foot pole.

Besides, PHP codebases are notorious for being incredibly messy. PHP as a language used to suck big time, so you'd be taking over lots and lots of legacy code that would make you cry. That's nowhere as big of a problem with Rails: it's newer and Ruby is a joy to work with.

How well paid are PHP jobs compared to Rails? I know the UK has abysmal salaries for developers (especially outside London) but the average salary for a PHP developer [1] is in a class of its own, much less than Ruby [2].

[1] http://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=PHP_Developer/Salary

[2] http://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=Ruby_Software_Develo...

If you have strong opinions on how things should be done with a web framework, I would suggest, for the sake of sanity, to purposefully learn Rails with an open mind and just let it do what it wants to do. When you learn it that way, it doesn't take long to figure out.

throwing shit together is insanely fast. i mean insanely. once i had a friend who was asking me for a time estimate on building a backend for his iOS app (mostly crud with a couple search routes) and i just did it for him in thirty minutes.

Yeah that's the incredible thing about Rails. It's just so fricking fast to set up a project. I kinda feel like it's going out of fashion - being eclipsed by Node mostly -and that sucks because I've never found another framework that is as simple and quick to work with.

Rails is nice, at least in the beginning. It's easy to pick it up and build something trivial, but it's pretty hard to solve some non-trivial issues -- you have to learn the framework internals. While, "frontend" side in Rails is pretty easy to grasp, internals are much harder, in my opinion (due to a very large codebase and Ruby's flexibility).

It is definitely a convenient tool, designed with programmer happiness in mind -- so there're a lot of things which will make your life easier. Although, sometimes this UX-centric model backfires and we get such things as RSpec.

Finally, it depends on what you are trying to achieve. If you are into money-side of the question, then maybe JavaScript ecosystem might be more worthwhile. Although, I believe that it is possible to bootstrap demand around tools that you are passionate about if you convince others to think the same way. My point being, that maybe you should look at the technologies that you love instead of following the market hype, but this is more harder and also means more time investment, but it pays off in the future.

The most important lesson I've learned from Rails is that you always have to learn the framework internals. If you're doing anything non-trivial, there will always be very helpful undocumented features, a much, much easier way to do things, and you can know how to build out entirely new functionality and keep it consistent with the core system so future developers don't have to learn every detail of your solution.

RSpec is not a "backfire" of Rails.

It's a generalized Ruby TDD tool which has very little to do with Rails per se.

The suggestion that RSpec was created to cover some failure of Rails strikes me as exceedingly strange.

I'll bite. If you know Ruby, I'd definitely recommend taking the next step and learning Rails. I started with Plain Old Ruby first as well by writing small scripts and then slowly graduated to Sinatra and ultimately Rails. Unless you are using Ruby for DevOps you can almost never go without having to interact with Rails or it's components in some way.

I know a little about a lot of things, but I know least of all about web development. I worked my way through some Sinatra tutorials and through the Cuba.rb book, but I just never got into it.

Are there any books that you'd recommend or anything?

Personally I find the most effective way to quickly pickup something is by using it in a project. I'd recommend some of these starter projects that you can download and start hacking: http://railsapps.github.io/

Ah, good idea. Thanks so much!

For learning RoR, I can't really recommend enough Agile Web Development with Rails 4 (although you might want to wait for a revised v5 version to pop up).

It takes you through building a simple site with a shopping cart from scratch, and lets you encounter enough real-world style situations to give you a really good grounding.

https://www.railstutorial.org/book

this one obviously.

Michael Hartl's tutorial!

https://www.railstutorial.org/

Funny. ~8 years ago people would learn Rails before even learning Ruby or proper programming.

Now people learn Docker and Micro Services before even learning proper programming.

To be fair if you know other programming language like php and have used mvc of php you don't really need to specifically learn ruby before starting using rails, you can pretty much learn it on the go I think, at least that worked for me

As long as people go into that realising they are learning Rails and not Ruby. So many Rails developers get totally lost if they're asked to do something in plain Ruby because they don't know what the differences are.

If you understand Rails, you'll have a better grasp of a lot of the other web frameworks out there that have been inspired by it. So even if you don't use it in the future, learning it may be helpful.

If you're really a ruby pro then you should really check out rails. I'd say that 80% or more of the 'ruby' work out there is really 'rails' work.

Rails will be useful regardless. Even when I am not working on a Rails project, I still use rails in some manner or another. Be it stubbing out a temp api for an Angular front or sculpting out a Schematic during planning. Over the years it's been an invaluable tool.

I get plenty of contract to hire jobs for rails to my inbox from linked in. Pay rates are usually $70k+, sometimes going above 100k for sr positions (for Austin and Dallas areas). So I'd say if you like ruby, then go for it. I don't really like ruby though, or rails.

Or course you should also learn some front end stuff too and be more full stack worthy, especially with ajax powered APIs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com