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Comment by larksimian | Hacker News Reader

You're building CRUD apps. The conventions work and are extensible for teams of 1, 10, 100 and 1000s. You are not special and neither is your product. Companies making millions or billions of dollars have used this framework successfully.

This level of bike-shedding is what makes conventions necessary especially when dealing with the typical hyper-pedantic software developer. Just the thought of having to debate where to put every file in a project or having to invent a new folder structure for every app we build fills me with a bizarre mixture of boredom and rage.

As with everything in life the people that whine about the medicine the most are the ones that make it necessary.

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Your model of companies using Rails with 1000s of engineers is almost comically naive. Look at what Shopify and Github have to do to make Rails work for them. Also look at the non Ruby code engineers there are writing and ask yourself why they might be doing it. Rails is not a religion. It can be good at what it does without having to go on a crusade when people point out its substantial limitations.

If your reverse your comment you could say “only when your reach 100s of developers will you need to start changing things a bit.”

Sounds good to me. Most companies never reach that scale and if they do, I think investing into some extras will be well worth it.

Tobi looks pretty chill about it in the documentary.

Totally, Rails is a great tool. So is my gunsmith hammer. I can like it for what it does without arguing it's the best thing in the world for cutting wood or joining two pieces of metal together.

you're seriously convinced they would have had no problems if they chose something else? every codebase that lasts that long and is used that much is going to face very hard challenges as it scales and meets new landmarks.

the maintainable codebase from day 1 to day 5000 is (mostly) a myth. yeah maybe some other stack could have faced different tradeoffs.

I'm also curious about YOUR choice of stack at this point.

I never said that some other stack wouldn't have problems. My point was that Rails is great at some problems and awful at others. No idea how this can be controversial at all. My impression seems to be that there is a group of fanboys that are not able to have any intelligent conversation on what their favorite tool is good for and what it's not good for.

In my day job I use mostly Rails. My team is starting to rewrite some of the services we own in Golang because Rails is no longer a good fit for the problems and scale we use it for. Rails was great to get started fast.

Nothing wrong with using a press instead of a hammer at some point, they are just tools.

> My team is starting to rewrite some of the services we own in Golang because Rails is no longer a good fit for the problems and scale we use it for.

What sort of web app do you have that is CPU bound?

It's an API gateway converting single digit MB-sized blobs of JSON into similarly sized blobs of JSON with a different structure.

The Rails app I scaled posted half a meg of JSON on every save-request every 10-15 seconds. In Rails, we parsed it, converted some parts into HTML nodes in Nokogiri, sanitized it, and saved it to both mysql and cassandra.

It wasn't a problem other than that a better initial design (nothing to do with rails) could have made passing all that data not needed, which was better for mobile. We had about 600,000 customers.

How many requests per second are you talking about roughly? One major problem we face is that downstream services also have performance problems and have multi second response times. While waiting for the response, a whole rails worker is sitting idle, taking up hundreds of megabytes of memory for seconds.

Is there any comparably complete framework that does not need any significant adjustments even when it's used by 1000s of developers building the same app?

Probably ASP.NET is as close as it gets.

This, it is also on the other end of performance spectrum.

Or its Java counterpart, Spring.

I think that's a bit unkind to ASP.NET ;-)

But yes, Spring and the various Java equivalents probably also fit the bill.

Can confirm. Nothing worse than figuring out what sort of "magic" is affecting a route in a huge Rails app. Oh look, a before_filter in a super class 4 levels up that is defined in an include helper. But wait, why isn't it affecting all calls and only some? Ah there's another chain of filters that you only can know about if you are familiar with the older Rails version API.

Rails is the "goto:" label of web frameworks. It's unbelievable how much it encourages spaghetti code and misdirection directly via its conventions.

I don't think it's necessarily bike shedding, and actually a lot of the sentiments resonated with me. Rails is a tool that does a tool's job. It's nice to know a hammer does hammer things when you're expecting it. If you need a level, maybe use a different tool. I think the main issue is everyone expecting it to be "one-size fits all." It was never meant to be that, really

This is part of the problem with your claim - many of us are not building CRUD apps, we are building complex enterprise software and there are unique challenges to solve.

At the end of the day, all programming is CRUD at various levels of abstraction. You read some data, and then create/update/delete various forms of related data in various locations, like your DBMS or maybe a file or your GPU's VRAM

Rails provides a way to approach CRUD via MVC. Controllers are your API. Models are the connection to the Database. Views are what the controllers render.

If your app doesn't do these 3 things - API, Database, and representation of your API - you don't need rails (I bet you do those three things). Other than that, you're free to layer on whatever architecture via ruby that you want on top of these basic rails constructs. If you don't like it, again don't use rails. It's opinionated for a reason

Then I think the focus should be on the API. At enterprise level, the API becomes the language, and the frameworks (and even departments to an extent) become the functions/methods.

Business = program

Company = class (business can be a conglomerate)

Department = method

frameworks = implementation details

> You're building CRUD apps.

No. "we" are not.

> Domain. Team. Project Planning. Combine any of them and the projects demand different things, but with Rails you are out of luck

hmm, sounds like this rails app that one might have not heard bout. You should check it out. Think it's called Basecamp

help I’ve just witnessed a murder

on the off chance someone doesn't understand the subtext here.

BaseCamp is DHH's company's product. DHH is the creator of Ruby on Rails. He literally create RoR to build BaseCamp, which is exactly the type of software the other poster is claiming is problematic for RoR.

DHH is on record as having said RoR was evolved organically from the early code of BaseCamp.

> which is exactly the type of software the other poster is claiming is problematic for RoR.

I wasn't. I specifically did not mention any concrete examples. I presume parent misread it as "for project management rails is unsuited" which, indeed it's not: specifically because PM is very much CRUD and has relatively little and/or relatively simple business logic (It's not for nothing that the hello-world of nearly all frameworks around CRUD are "TODO lists", the simplest form of PM).

What I tried to say, is that your domain, your team, your timing, your specific planning and your kind of project and any combination thereof has different needs. A setup, architecture, framework, fits one or a few of these perfect. But never all of the combinations of them. Nor over time (today you are a one-man-shop, tomorrow a team of 6. Today you build a full-stack web, tomorrow you need APIs for integration. Today you build a CRUD app for some medication journal, tomorrow it pivots into a complex tool for medical research.)

then you worded it badly.

> Domain. Team. Project Planning. Combine any of them and the projects demand different things, but with Rails you are out of luck

There's no reasonable interpretation of that in which BaseCamp doesn't fall into the list of things that you feel RoR is poor at.

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