Comment by sidstling | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sidstling | Hacker News Reader

Almost every, and probably every, language that has been used for serious production is relevant in 2018. COBOL is still one of the most important languages in the belly of a lot of financial and public software.

You wouldn’t build something new on cobol if you could avoid it of course, but rails is not cobol. Ruby and rails are still good at getting things out the door.

I wouldn’t personally touch it, but that’s because I’ve never heard about anyone using it in my country. If you live in a place where a lot of shops use ruby and rails, then why not?

Changing tech isn’t easy, so you should only do it if you’re motivated. We’ve been doing more and more JS/Node where I work because it’s really good at getting things done quickly, sort of similar to why you’d chose ruby and rails. However I’ve been a C# developer for years, and I’m nowhere near as good in the JS environment as I am in .Net. I’ll get there eventually of course, but I probably wouldn’t without the internal motivation of actually enjoying the change, partly because JS is so great at getting things done.

The key questions to me when chosing a language would be, do I really want to learn it? Why do I want to learn it? And also, is anyone in my area hiring for it?.

> We’ve been doing more and more JS/Node where I work because it’s really good at getting things done quickly, sort of similar to why you’d chose ruby and rails

I assume people make them comparisons because both ecosystems have a lot of third party libraries, which means if you want to add some functionality there’s probably a library out there for it. I don’t really feel that comparisons like this are really that accurate though (and are often made by people who don’t have experience with Rails).

If you are using something like Node or Go you need to have knowledge about which libraries you need to use (bearing in mind that often changes every year or so, compared to the Ruby ecosystem which is a lot more stable) and write all the glue logic to make them work together yourself. With Rails you can literally build a blog by running a handful of commands and editing a couple of views, and have something up and running in less than 15 minutes.

The beauty of Rails is that it’s opininated enough, that you can build a pretty decent application just by using what it gives you out of the box. Yes you may want to add Sidekiq for better performance of background jobs, or Devise to avoid all the repetitive code you need to handle user accounts, or add RSpec because TestUnit is the devil, but those aren’t required to get something done.

I only meant to compare them in the sense that they are both really good at getting a working prototype up and running fast.

You’re absolutely right that this requires knowledge of packages for node/js. We haven’t been using a whole lot of modules to achieve this, but we certainly haven’t used just Node/JS either.

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