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Comment by secstate | Hacker News Reader

How can Rails live long if no one creates new things with it? Our web applications aren't like the Pyramids at Giza. DHH literally said that even without a blank canvas (Hey's backend) they were still able to re-write the backend in Rust and are not looking back.

That sure sounds like any savvy business should pivot away from Rails and Ruby in general as fast as they can, assuming they have tokens to burn. Personally, I built my career on Python, but any new thing I build is almost always in Go or Rust. Why mess with an interpreter if you don't have to?

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Having built two apps in the last two years using Rails (one making front page on Hacker News and has 10,000 plus users), there is a sweet spot that Rails hits that other frameworks don’t.

The fact that you get so much out of the box that just works and you don’t have to do much beyond configure it reduces a ton of headaches.

Absolutely would rather be using Go instead of Ruby but for apps of a certain kind and size, the omakase approach of Rails still wins out.

He clarified today, saying he would build any new app today in Rails. Should that app become so popular that it would benefit from Rust, he would rewrite it in Rust.

Source?

According to the schedule, today had a keynote on "AI and the future of Ruby & Rails — a chat with Matz & DHH". I suspect that might have clarified, but sadly they don't seem to have released a video (yet?)

This might just be damage control or politeness more than the truth.

You can accuse DHH of many things, but not of grifting, insincerity, political politeness/correctness just not to offend people. The guy speaks his mind and is unapologetic about it.

It would have been the case if he said all the things in keynote unprepared like in a podcast. i.e Speaking his mind.

But it wasn't.

I often need to prepare to speak my mind

How is DHH not a grifter? Is the white replacement conspiracy theory he promotes suddenly not a hoax?

The drastic change in the ethnic/cultural makeup of people leaving in many Western countries is a fact. In Finland it is +70% foregners only in the past 10 years. Do you want to dispute stats? Write to the Finnish department of statistics.

Or are you arguing that this is a natural process and politicians can't influence it? Wrong. Pre-post Brexit stats show the opposite. As do the stats from Denmark, after politicians started working on the issue.

You are fine with stats, but don't like DHH's opinions about those facts? Well, those are opinions and everyone has a right to them. Opinions and feelings based on morals can't really be proved incorrect.

Or are you tone policing?

So what exactly is the actual problem? "Someone on the internet has wrong opinions and is not a carbon copy of me, politically"? What a silly and totalitarian behavior to call other people dirty names!

Stop pretending that racism and xenophoby are just political opinions. They are not.

Stop calling anyone with differing opinions a racist or xenophobe. It really feels like these activists are deliberately misusing powerful words in order to weaken them (if everyone is called a racist, no matter how undeservedly, then no one is). Or they are simply stupid and do not understand the reaction they are causing with their totalitarian tactics.

When someone says that people who are UK citizen aren't british because they are black or brown, yes this is xenophoby.

This is not an opinion, and it is actually a lie because the actual law and constitution of said country disagree.

Or from Hong Kong

He was't talking about the color of the skin or a passport. He was talking about the culture, does it integrate well, is it compatible, is it "enriching" or actually enriching. Is the person and the group this person belongs to, a negative or a positive for the country, the society, the original/native people.

This has nothing to do with the race or a color of one's skin. Like Idris Elba is British as is Rishi Sunak.

Racism is also an opinion some people choose to have. If people don't like being called racist there's a very easy solution to that.

Are you really so ignorant or just pretending to be? White replacement is a conspiracy theory with no basis in reality. You are not under attack. You are not being suppressed or silenced. DHH just doesn’t like people with skin tones darker than his own and who don’t live their lives as presented on nazi party’s propaganda posters. Statistics ain’t on his side. I’m just relaying what he said, if you don’t like that, take that to DHH. I do not endorse nazism.

And I’m not saying anyone’s opinions are wrong, I’m just saying calls to violence, such as DHH’s suggested deportations of people based solely on their skin color, are not opinions. Violence mustn’t be re-labeled as an opinion. Advocating for harming people or violating their agency cannot pass as political position, not even fringe one. You are free to have opinions, values and beliefs, but don’t think other people will be fine with that when your opinion starts affecting their lives. No matter what someone’s external appearance makes you think about a person, they also have opinions, values and beliefs.

(This just a short summary of what basic human decency is.)

I agree with him. All software should be written in safe languages, but there is a wide selection available. For new projects you should pick a language that does as much for you as possible. Ruby and Rails both go out of their way to provide the developer with as much power as they can. They make development less expensive. That’s exactly what you want when you are first building something, before you know exactly what you will need.

Later after you have lots of users and your hosting costs are rising, then you can rewrite it in a language that gets you closer to the machine. You won’t need to do any exploration at that point, and you’ll already know where the performance hot spots are. Of course I recommend Rust for that, but that is merely my personal preference.

Yes, true enough.

But there is a "dead middle".

If you have a big cash flow to go with "...lots of users and [rising] hosting costs" then, yes, you're spot on

But if there is insufficient cash flow then costs are rising and you are a bit stuck.

Perhaps, but if you don’t have revenue then you have lots of problems besides this one.

Oh well that's... um.

> Why mess with an interpreter if you don't have to?

I mean I haven’t touched Ruby in years but if you’ve got tokens to burn, who cares? Compute is pretty cheap these days and Ruby is usually fast enough for web stuff, and as far as I can tell 2nd hand the robots write it just fine.

And I say this as someone building a strongly typed programming language that compiles to native code.

Maybe not the most popular answer, but... because JIT?

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