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The industry is heading this direction but the problem with microservices is that they're frequently chosen prematurely / misused / cargo-culted, chosen as a panacea without considering their tradeoffs and communication overhead.

Most of it really just goes back to the fallacies of distributed computing. A lot of people don't think about ways that microservices, by way of being decoupled, can be less efficient or fail between components, the network, etc where a monolith can't… until after they're built (or never).

The majority of apps in the world don't reach the point where the benefits of microservices outweigh their tradeoffs. Or they choose microservices to fix a problem that is really that the app is not decomposed well into clean modules and components. Even the creator of microservices says to go monolith first (https://martinfowler.com/bliki/MonolithFirst.html).

I partially agree...but... I would say that Ruby/RoR usage is really regional and that is visible in the US,UK,Japan and bunch of other places. Remember that Java/C# were really popular even before Android and mobile platforms. Java was the obvious choice in the Android era, C# slowly caught up with the Xamarin and new initiatives like .NET CORE and CoreRT. Javascript / NodeJS got really popular because of the low barrier and huge community and fast adoption rate by large corporations.

Ruby(VM) is unfortunate for not attracting critical mass of users and capital. I mean cmon you can't really compare jvm.clr,v8 and ruby vm. It really is unfair. Ruby supports a lot of magic,different paradigm and the runtimes mentioned earlier received billions in funding over decades. Of course they are "fast".

I mean you need really expensive ingredients to succeed in 21st century in tech. You can be fast and elegant (Crystal,Nim) but what does it matter if you are not mature enough (java,c#,js). Or you are mature enough (ruby and its ecosystem) but you are not fast enough and you did not try enough to cover other markets (adoption by big companies was fairly low, Rubymotion was a poorly executed project so no Android/iOS coverage because of the high costs and lack of interest from community)

Rails wasn't about Ruby, Rails was all about dev productivity, and Ruby happened to be the best language at the time.

The thing is, as you point out, the world has moved in this decade and we have seen most of the Rails key points transposed to other tech stacks, old elephants learning new tricks --see Symfony in PHP, Spring in Java, etc...

Add to that that Rails is mostly feature complete: it's the best tool for developing what DHH calls "elegant monolyths", and I feel the proposition remains true.

But, as the rest of tech stacks has moved on, so has happened in the edge tech stacks, with things like microservices, concurrency, async frameworks, etc, i.e: Node -which seems to be waning due to JS fatigue, Elixir... Rails doesn't seem to be targeting those because Rails doesn't need them.

This is kind of a sad reflection, but Rails is the best frameworks for building things that the industry needs less and less: it is neither "enterprise" in spirit, although it is in capability, and is neither the cool kid in the block.

We will see less developer mindshare because "cool" devs will have moved to sexier things, and "enterprise" teams will go the way of the newer .NET and Java buzzwords.

"..building things that the industry needs less and less.." What do you mean by that ? Or what does industry need ?

Microservices are cool but a nightmare to manage,maintain and keep everyone in sync. It's a buzzword in my book but I believe only a handful companies can really benefit from them.

Java/C# are strong in enterprise and while this community dismisses enterprise what I mean is that it is used everywhere and by everyone. You want to communicate to some obscure endpoint that manages this container ship ? SOAP api is there to serve you along with ready to use libs.

Besides..

C#/Java You want to build desktop apps ? Check You want to build mobile apps ? Check You want to talk to hardware (printers,peripherals) ? Check You want to build APIs ? Check You want to build Games ? Check You want to build traditional web apps ? Check

Thanks to Facebook and other companies this is also becoming more and more possible with Javascript as well.

What can Ruby/Rails offer ? Not much.

I'm not sure if I understand. Are you saying that Ruby is more mature than Java and C#?

Well, Ruby and Java were both first released in 1995. C# is a bit newer, having been released in 2000.

I'm not sure that's at all what he was saying, though.

> like it or not, microservices are here and they solve real problems

Sure, sometimes they do. But more often than not they introduce more problems than they fix, or at best, they fail to fix the original problems.

Most of the benefits that people who choose microservices are looking for come more from good design and are completely orthogonal to microservices vs monolith. For example, separating code out into separate repos and deployments doesn't automatically separate concerns. But microservices inherently introduce a lot of challenges in orchestration, managing state, testing, deployment and all kinds of things that are much easier with a monolith.

Microservices is one of the most cargo-culted ideas in software development these days. I suspect there will be a backlash against it before too much longer. Will there be a resurgance of interest in Rails? Probably not. I suspect something at a much higher abstraction level will take over.

It's not only microservices, either : building frontend apps largely makes RoR less attractive, today. When SPA came around (I prefer to say "web clients", nowadays, since they indeed manage multiple pages and routing), we didn't believe in it. Sure, it had nice use cases, but those hashtags in urls and the fact they can't be indexed by search engines certainly meant they were going nowhere.

Today, web clients are a thing for many applications (and I build some too). So we're left with RoR to build static pages and APIs, which seems clearly overkilled. I still use rails on many projects, because it's cool how activerecord and actioncontroller allow to build something fast. But actionview, journey, the helpers, the asset pipeline, etc all feel like we're bringing in a lot for no advantage, when writing web clients.

> Ruby, as a language, is completely stuck and stale, and has been for a long time now. There is no real innovation, the single-threadedness and the GIL are just not good enough in 2017. Ruby 3 has been announced for 2020, and if you ask me, what is promised in terms of features is rather too little, too late.

Very rarely does anyone say this. But both Matz and DHH were slow to realise those problems. Cant really blame them since Matz dont even write much Ruby, he write C. And if Rails is all about extracting code from Basecamp. May be Shoptify, GitHub and Cookpad ( All magnitude larger then Basecamp )should step up the game for Rails development.

Outside Rails, Ruby fail to attract any Scientific usage, or even General Programming.

RoR wont die. But it will likely falls into a niche that will gets smaller and smaller. May be yes, it is too little too late.

I'm halfway through Michael Hartl's RoR tutorial (IMHO, it's very good) and so your comment is a little disheartening. What are the top one or two technologies (aside from just Javascript) that you would learn today?

I would finish that tutorial. RoR shows you what a cohesive approach can do to a framework and it'll get you used to good design patterns that can serve you elsewhere.

I would then move on to learn about elixir and Phoenix if I were in your position. Phoenix is similar enough to the good parts of rails but all the really nice stuff is way better than rails. ActionCable in rails is a joke compared to what elixir can deliver.

Golang, Java (and a 3rd would be Rust)

Those are just languages though. They don't really compare to RoR. For the record, I think Ruby is a wonderful language. Python is still my go-to scripting language, but I do admire the expressiveness of Ruby when written by people that know what they are doing.

I have a fair bit of Java experience but it isn't current (I did Tomcat-based stuff).

Finish that tutorial, understanding Rails will help you undertand better other frameworks that were inspired by Rails.

Or, if you ask me, learn Elixir + Phoenix. I'm betting part of my future career and my company on it, because I believe that it's the future. But Go, Clojure or Scala are great choices for web development as well these days.

Elixir is hardly visible in the jobs market. At least if Indeed.com is to be believed. It's too niche. Clojure is at least as good as Elixir, if not better, and has failed to gain widespread adoption after 8 years since 1.0 so I don't see Elixir going anywhere. There's just too much competition.

Can you recommend one or two language + framework combinations that might be a better choice than RoR?

Elixir/Phoenix, Clojure/Luminus, ClojureScript/Macchiato and Scala/Play are arguably better than Rails if you really grok FP but they don't have the community, maturity and adoption that Rails has enjoyed for a long time. If you're ok with OO monoliths Rails is hard to beat.