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Comment by DeathArrow | Hacker News Reader

Is Ruby still a thing in web development? It seems to me most backend use Java, C#, Node with a bit of PHP here and there.

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I would say so, I am subscribed to a mailing list which sums of what's happening within the Ruby and Rails community every week, and there are constantly new startups or projects going on.

An interesting point is that Twitter started in rails and migrated to something (java?) that was faster after they got users. Ideally it would not be necessary to fully replace the application after launch but getting it out the door quickly to start iterating has its upsides.

The biggest problem Twitter had was using MySQL for data storage.They moved to Scala, and while it was not quite a disaster, it did slow progress and also had to be largely simplified. Meanwhile places like GitHub and Shopify proved you could keep on scaling with Rails.

What?

Shopify and GitHub uses MySQL heavily.

And so does Youtube and other behemoths.

Where did you get the notion that MySQL doesn't scale?

Exactly- using Twitter's problems on Rails as evidence it doesn't scale is only slightly more wrong than blaming on them on MySQL. Twitter started moving to Cassandra in 2010 to deal with scaling issues they were having with MySQL sharding (gizzard), but continued to release patches to MySQL to address their needs, then eventually created their own data store, Manhattan, optimized for their particular usage patterns. None of this means MySQL (or Rails) can't scale.

> The biggest problem Twitter had was using MySQL for data storage.

Sorry but I find this part contradictory.

And the argument that follows sounds like backpedaling.

Twitter ended up ditching Rails anyways despite "fixing" their data storage. So to me their problem was indeed Rails.

MySQL was the biggest problem they had though! They brought in Lucene (Earlybird) that massively improved performance- which makes a lot of sense.(in addition to adding Cassandra and eventually manhattan).

Then they started building a lot of things that weren't web applications, like RPC servers (where they created the finagle library) they ended up with a team where Scala and the JVM was more their area of expertise and interest and solution to every issue.

No one thinks you use MySQL to build every kind of data application, no one thinks you use Rails to build every kind of server.

Doesn't matter what language you use when your architecture is wrong for the problem you're trying to solve.

Last two orgs (and they're large orgs) I've been in have phased it out in favour of node or python on the basis that nobody wants to hire for it. Short-sighted in my view, but that's not a battle I can win.

yes of course it is. Shopify is Rails, as are countless other companies.

There is some life in Rails, but new greenfield rails projects are rare. It is mostly legacy stuff now.

The ecosystem is slowly fading away. Big industrial libs are still good, but a lot of smaller projects are abandonware, last updated in 18-19.

The cool kids moved on to Go, Rust, TS, Elixir etc.

It always puzzled me why Crystal didn't catch up?

It seems like they just had to publish couple of benchmarks and articles here and there and that could have been it.

As it has good C interop story it could have a good chance riding on AI hype wave few years later in this alternative history.

Because there's not enough differences/advantages compared to Go.

Metaprogramming, null safety, syntax familiarity (with Ruby), algebraic types - there are quite a lot of advantages/differences, no?

I’m not sure if it changed, but Crystal was limited to a single core which I imagine made it easier to choose Go over Crystal.

That and I’ve found that folks often aren’t very receptive to Ruby like syntaxes initially.

This thread's context is large rails userbase around 2008'ish (people were changing computers from pcs to macs with textmate to do rails, perception of devs changed from nerds to cool kids - the whole thing was quite huge) that dissolved substantially. Crystal's syntax in this context feels like huge wasted/missed opportunity.

Crystal had a bit of a slow start. It was promising, but the deployment issues persisted longer than they should have, and by the time they were fixed, you had other toolchains that filled the same niche. Elixir did "ruby" better than crystal OR ruby did.

I really wanted to like Crystal, and used it for a few projects. But the immaturity and timing was it's kryptonite.

> It always puzzled me why Crystal didn't catch up?

M:N wasn't added until late 2019 :( -- https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/pull/8112

This claim seems to be supported by Google Trends [1]

Rails has been on a downward trend for the last 6 years.

[1] https://trends.google.co.in/trends/explore?cat=958&date=2017...

More than "a bit" of PHP, lad.

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