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Comment by duiker101 | Hacker News Reader

Slightly off but is it just me or Ruby and Rails pretty much disappeared in a puff of smoke after being all over HN for a while?

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Ruby on Rails has entered the 'boring' phase of the hype cycle, because it's 1) widely used 2) extremely reliable 3) lacking controversy. Have you used ActiveStorage or ActionCable lately? They're brand new, probably not relevant to HN at large, and awesome!

Adding to this, I have this blog post bookmarked from an HN post a few months ago:

http://www.codethinked.com/it-takes-all-kinds

It was made in response to a popular post claiming that Rails is “yesterday’s software”.

The php community understands what you are going through. We made it through you guys will too.

ActionCable chokes at scale though - you’re better off using Phoenix Channels which can scale vertically for very little money and for a long long time.

Heroku free tier + hobby dev pg + Phoenix channels = 27000 concurrent users before Postgres starts complaining

Hacker News is all about hype and shiny new things, which Rails is not anymore. Node.js was the shiny new thing after Rails "went out of fashion" and just like Rails, Node.js is not the talk of the day anymore. It's having LTS releases, a committee and stuff, all the bells and whistles, but it's not fresh. As Node.js fell out of love, React was the new thing, along with all the different JS frameworks, but no one really cares anymore (it's "so last year").

We've now entered the ML/AI wave, which will last for a few months until people get bored and start getting excited for the new new thing (WebAssembly and the C/C++ toolchain? VR? Bitcoin?).

Rust for the frontend powered by blockchain ai which will power 3d printing and drone gamifacation.

There pretty much aren't that many new problems to solve that RoR ecosystem hasn't solved already, hence hard to generate hype. RoR developers are busy building things and don't spend much time on forums anyway.

And those that do, they are on forums to learn about new exciting shiny frameworks/languages, like Elixir

These days, everything is about JavaScript as lot's of exciting stuff keep happening in the area. What's the latest exciting thing that happened with RoR?

Some of us see stability as a positive. You don't have to make headlines every week to be reliable and useful!

I'm not saying that it's bad, the thing is that you don't talk too much about a mature tech with established ways of doing things.

Most people I know who have worked on Rails apps eventually came to strongly dislike the implicit "magical" rules that drew them to it in the first place, after working on large Rails apps for some time, and many of them have moved to Clojure, which I'm guessing is a knee-jerk reaction to problems caused by magic and mutability, both of which Clojure code encourages us to stay away from.

Most moved to Clojure? That's interesting. My path went like this: C++ -> VB6 -> C# & JS -> Rails -> Clojure. But that last move was after looking at Haskell, OCaml, Scala, F#, and friends.

I'd be very interested in reading about your (and other's) experience in making the transition to Clojure.

Probably not most Rails devs, but most of the ones I know in Chicago have. And that's not a big sample in and of itself, either, plus many of them know each other. So take it with a grain of salt.

My personal experience is probably not very representative. I was doing Rails up until I began working on cleancoders.com 5 years ago, which was entirely written in Clojure using Compojure.

Honestly it's not that much different than working in Express.js these days, considering all the improvements to the JS language and ecosystem. Ruby has Sinatra too which is pretty comparable to Compojure and Express.

There's also something to be said for the novelty effect. Many people who went from Ruby to Clojure went from Java to Ruby because of the novelty, and probably went from Ruby to Clojure for the same reason, and at least a few of them have since moved to Elixir for probably the same reason.

Magic meaning "I don't understand the conventions and haven't bothered to understand them so I'll either move on to another framework with different magical rules that I understand or I'll just write raw SQL."

No. Magic meaning that the framework tries to insulate you from the technology to the point that you're left following conventions. And by the time you dig into the implementation, like if you need to corner an edge case, you've had to credentialize in code that was far more complex than the non-magical solution ever could be.

It's pretty lame painting other developers as idiots. If you can't identify with the common complaints about Rails, then you haven't used it long enough.

The question isn't whether it has warts or not. Of course it has them. The question is whether or not they're worth it to you.

I have to agree. I remember several years back RoR was in every third headline.

Rails has simply become dull, and that's not a bad thing. It's a solid choice for most web applications, once you know the framework it's very easy to write complex software quickly in a sensible manner.

It matches what I think I'm seeing in the monthly job openings postings, much fewer Ruby on Rails versus other options on the server side.

To whomever downvoted, I'd love to see evidence to the contrary, because I'm only looking for Django or Rails experience listings and not seeing as much as prior years.

What is taking its place React? Or something like php.

I think definitely more React, more node.js, Python more than Rails, php seems slightly lower level than Rails, but not scientific study, also just ycombinator and angel list browsing. There were only a couple of Rails listings and the one off posting where the company in Atlanta had a posting for a Rails engineer on site.

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