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Comment by cageface | Hacker News Reader

This is because the next generation of hot coders is working on JS or something more exotic like Rust. This is why I think that even though Rails is still a good platform for building a certain class of webapps the writing is on the wall and I'm planning to transition away from it over the next few years.

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Or you could become an open source contributor and improve the ecosystem by submitting PRs to existing gems or writing your own.

The community is us. Ruby is what we make it. So let's make it better.

Rails has been very good to me over the years so I am tempted to try to help out but I think if I'm going to volunteer I'd prefer to help a more modern stack like KTOR.

I'm in the same spot. I still use & love Rails, but having adopted TypeScript & VS Code (w/ React) for the front-end, I find myself missing those luxuries when I switch back to Ruby/Rails/Vim.

I'm leaning towards a full TypeScript stack for my next project. The idea of sharing types & code between client & server is incredibly seductive. But there's no Rails for TS/Node, so I know it's going to be a shit show assembling all of my chosen libraries into a cohesive whole.

Although looking at your previous comment, perhaps I should give Kotlin / Ktor a try?

FYI I think Redwood is trying hard to be Rails for TS/Node...

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22537944)

Redwood looks really interesting. I'd like to try it on a small project. The emphasis on serverless seems like a bit of a different direction than Rails though.

I'm in exactly the same boat. Rails gives you so much functionality for free. Kotlin/KTor is not a drop in replacement since it's closer to something like Sinatra in scope but it still looks like the best bet going forward to me.

In 5 years there'll be another shiny thing everyone will flock to. It's part of the fun, but there are some languages that just do that particular thing just right. Ruby/Rails is bittersweet to me. It does that thing just so right, but it feels like there's an evolution around the corner that could be an upgrade when it comes to the ecosystem. It certainly doesn't feel like Rust is a good replacement if you enjoy Ruby syntax and dynamic typing simplicity. Ruby reminds me a lot of how Perl 5 is a great language, yet finding jobs in Perl 5 is becoming more and more difficult.

I'd love to think that Raku (formerly Perl 6) would be that language, but it doesn't seem like the trajectory is there.

Consider Laravel (PHP) and Django (Python) if you want a like-for-like replacement in a better supported ecosystem.

I'd probably go for Django but it feels like a step sideways more than a step forward. Once you've gotten used to a more modern language with great tooling, typechecking & null handling it's frustrating to go back to a stack where you're getting errors in production that would have been caught by a compiler.

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