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Comment by hota_mazi | Hacker News Reader

> In summary, we 'still' use Rails as it works just fine.

PHP works fine. COBOL works fine.

Nobody ever said Rails doesn't work. Or doesn't work fine. That's a straw man.

It's just that Rails, and Ruby in general, is in clear decline. Not just because some new flavor of the month frameworks are coming out, but because a lot of the concepts Rails supports are antiquated, and Rails hasn't shown to be that adaptable to more modern front end trends after years of efforts from DHH.

Hell, I'm sure that even DHH himself would be very upset if people settled for something that "works just fine". He's just not happy that this time around, that characterization is being used to describe his creation.

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1) "a lot of the concepts Rails supports are antiquated" ...

2) "Rails hasn't shown to be that adaptable to more modern front end trends"

Would you mind elaborating? What Rails concepts are "antiquated", and what "modern front end trends" does Rails not adapt to?

I've never done any Rails development, but understand the general idea of how it works, so I don't have any skin in the game. I'm just honestly curious about what you were referring to.

I imagine SPA trends with frameworks such as Angular are leading to the parent’s conclusion. However, you can still use SPA frameworks and just use Rails as an API, or you can take a step back and realize a large percentage of web apps still don’t need a complex SPA framework and might get enough front-end functionality out of something like Vue. In other words, many developers fall into the trap of choosing tools they prefer even when they may take more time to use and not provide enough business value. Plenty of web apps would ship faster if built with Rails and be just fine.

> It's just that Rails, and Ruby in general, is in clear decline

[Citation Needed]

In my experience the demand for rails has only gone up within the last few years and rails is only getting better.

> Rails hasn't shown to be that adaptable to more modern front end trends

You clearly haven't been keeping up with rails .. Rails now integrates seamlessly with React, Vuejs,.. and has built in support for yarn and webpacker .

In addition, with the introduction of ActionCable, you can have websocket integration as well with Pub/Sub.

All in all, Rails remains a very mature, robust framework to build your business on.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F050...

Not apples to apples but I don't see the decline in Rails. I would say that I definitely see fewer job postings for Rails work overall and more for separate backend and React work.

There's a better chart here for sites using RoR: https://trends.builtwith.com/framework/Ruby-on-Rails

For comparison here's the one for express: https://trends.builtwith.com/framework/Express

This is still sort of the mainstream view on this, but I think a return to monolithic Rails-style frameworks is coming. Microframeworks and especially Node got a lot of popularity, and then all the microservice stuff started to get popular and overused as well, and ultimately this is leading a lot of people to do unnecessary work and ending up with a custom solution that isn't as good as what they could've had off the shelf.

As for modern front end trends, Rails is getting better in this regard, especially since 5.0. Most people typically have a separate frontend and backend codebase anyways, so in that sense Rails API is all you need, and that's baked in now.

From conversations with an experienced PHP dev who was recently looking for remote opportunities, all of the good and high paying options were in Ruby.

PHP suffers from an abundance problem where programmer opportunities are concerned. There are a lot of “PHP” developers with skill levels that are highly variable, from Wordpress devs to really hardcore programmers.

This is very true as a php developer myself I notice that there are a lot of low pay wordpress jobs available to php developers. At the same time you can get more serious jobs with equivalent pay as other languages in php but there seems to be a lot more competition for them.

> because a lot of the concepts Rails supports are antiquated

I actually see Rails as a framework that has managed to keep up with the times better than most. Django, for instance, has aged less well than Rails imo.

What alternative exists that’s better than “fine”? All of the popular framework options have major cons/arguments against. It’s almost as if some of the choices we make when picking software development ecosystems are subjective.

How do you figure Ruby in general is in decline?

Not the person you asked, but it does seem like there was a drop in popularity over the past 6 months (according to TIOBE):

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ruby/

>a lot of the concepts Rails supports are antiquated

Can you provide some examples? Rails is quite forward thinking when you consider Action Cable and upcoming Active Storage.

As much as I like Rails, those are two examples of catching up. The approach from Active Storage has been the way uploads should have been handled for over a decade and Action Cable is good-enough-for-prototype but otherwise not scalable at all.

Over a decade? That long ago, we were storing image uploads in a BLOB column in Oracle! I used Heroku, AWS and GAE within a year of each of their debuts, and if I recall correctly, there weren't a lot of frameworks that had a handy dandy approach to generically storing uploads in <XYZ-CLOUD>. Were there any even?

And as for Action Cable, I hear anycable.io can give you a performance boost if you need it. I've used websockets in both Node.js and Java Spring and although it's awesome for some use cases, a majority of apps will never reach for it. So this is a good example of Rails focusing on things that will help most people without trying to cover every tool that everyone will ever desire.

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