Comment by Shicholas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Shicholas | Hacker News Reader

No.

Long time rails developer, but if you can green-light a project I'd highly recommend node all the way. I've found it much easier to comprehend a pure javascript stack (or even better an all-Typescript stack) due to substantially less cognitive overhead, find other people to work with (very important as your project scales), and the fact I can deploy node with a serverless implementation on Azure, GCP, and AWS makes it a home run when it comes to security and devops costs (and the need for devops in general).

While rails has a bunch of great features, those features (rightfully) have been copied elsewhere, e.g. Active Record, which has a fantastic javascript implementation - TypeORM.

Finally, when it comes to interface development, nothing in rails will get you as far as React these days, especially as the web moves mobile, and into AR/VR, which IMO present the next challenges of interface development. And like rails, nearly every question related to React/Node is answered on Stack Overflow or has a well-documented library to solve that use case.

It seems like you're comparing a framework with a language?

What framework do you use on node.js?

My experience with nodejs has been pretty poor. I'll give some examples;

* The language and runtime is constantly updating - there is no such thing as stability

* Even npm couldn't produce deterministic installs until this year

* npm dependency hell

* there are lots of ways to do any task, so there is much fragmentation with advice / community

* the repls in node suck compared to pry

* I can't find a good opinionated framework - so everyone lays out each application differently, with different standards etc. That means you end up spending a ridiculous amount of time configuring everything.

* most apps i've needed to make don't actually benefit from being a SPA. It's a cargo cult thing.

* javascript as a language sucks!

This is exactly all the pain points I had with node. Left it about a year ago, Forever.

GraphQL and Express (wrapped with AWS Lambda's express handler for deploys)

To answer your points:

* You're right it hasn't been - but it is now with LTS releases of Node.

* I agree, this is why I use yarn.

* Yarn has solved any dependency issues I've witnessed.

* While this is true, every solution boils down to simple objects or simple functions. New solutions tend to be simpler than the status quo (e.g. redux)

* While debugging isn't as easy - all my back-end code boils down to simple functions which just need a simple test (I use mocha which is a lot like RSpec). Also Typescript and TSLint enforce types and code styling so I don't really need the pry-style debugging.

* The only configuration I feel you need is Typescript and TSLint which will enforce a very specific way of styling code, file naming conventions and so much more. From there my individual functions representing GraphQL mutations and queries on the back-end or React components on the front-end are small, modular, and encapsulated in a folder to make for an easy `cp -vr`.

* You're only talking about web. React Native/VR are extremely compelling reasons to expand beyond just the browser. Plus I feel separation of front/back-end makes for faster product development on bigger teams.

* Haha yes, though ES2015 made it a lot better and Typescript has made it complete IMO. Microsoft and Google have both made substantial investments into the language, with the former making it as big of a center-point as C#. That's saying something. You can code Typescript code on a cheaper and faster Windows machine, ruby? much more difficult.

> Finally, when it comes to interface development, nothing in rails will get you as far as React these days

Rails's out-of-the-box React integration [1] should get you _exactly_ as far as React these days.

[1] https://github.com/rails/webpacker#react

While this is interesting, you're proposing a monolithic repo with two predominant languages. I think it's much harder to get the benefits of riding the NPM wave while the front-end is stuck in a rails project such as using Typescript, React Native, etc. These are all possible of course, but there's a Rails Webpacker library that's an extra intermediary between the author and their JS code.

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