The Rails Value Proposition No Longer Adds Up (2014) | Hacker News Reader

The Rails Value Proposition No Longer Adds Up (2014)

mattbriggs.net

17 pointsmjohn14 comments

Rails still wins on one very important metric: development speed. Thanks to the rich ecosystem of gems and succinct API I can get something up and running on Rails fast. In the early stages of a project that often counts for more than anything else. Even for a pure JSON API backend Rails still beats anything else I've tried.

I don't think so. Development speed in the Rails ecosystem is slowed down by the gems tendency to mess things up with very liberal monkey patching.

Continuing to use Rails today is like staying with PHP yesterday, you continue because that's what you know the best and that you have heavily invested in, not because it's the best out there.

EDIT:

* My best alternative for now: Django

* The Rails community is awesome

* Ruby is awesome

It's just that Rails grew too much as a hairy ball now.

And what's the best out there ?

I think Django is winning in a lot of points compared to rails now: Small API, simple to use and deploy, nice performances, comparable ecosystem,...

I believe Rails can be as modular and stripped down ?

And, FWIW, Ruby is still a lot of fun to develop with. Not sure if developer happiness is a good metric for selecting frameworks though.

It is for the developer.

Development speed? Getting shitty insecure apps out there at web speed?

Your comment lacks of arguments and facts, isn't it? :-)

First of all: you can make shitty insecure apps with whatever language/framework/system out there without worrying about development speed. And you can usually avoid this by knowing what you're doing.

Ruby/Rails lets me to build a prototype/MVP in a weekend (while having a lot of fun too). I can fix/iterate or even switch stack later, if needed.

Yes, because Clojure and Go used soooooo much more than F#, Scala and Lua (among others).

Rails was nice when it came out, other languages/frameworks caught up. NodeJS non-blocking IO was nice when it came out, other languages/frameworks caught up. Now that you have those 'features' in other languages (Play for JVM and ASP MVC on .net to name two), some folks gone back to those platforms while others stayed in Rails/NodeJS. Only the freaking hipsters - look at me I have a blog - developers are switching platforms every 2 years for the next shiny thing.

(and I know there were other languages/frameworks that did similar as Rails/NodeJS but just never caught up)

People reducting Rails to a framework used to "generate HTML" like the author have a quite narrow vision of what Rails is capable of in 2015. It's perfectly possible (and easy) to use it as the backend for an API and there have even been moves towards getting out of the classic HTTP request/response foundation of the framework (ActionCable, ActionController::Live to name a few).

I bought into this type of hyperbole a few years ago when some Node frameworks were picking up steam (Sails and Meteor mostly). After six months of being reminded of what a less mature ecosystem does for productivity, I came back to Rails with a new sense of gratitude.

To be honest it never did. Rails was far too full of magic, security holes, shitty architecture that fell apart under even small load to be taken seriously, and yet it was. The rest of us carried on quietly delivering quality apps, a bit baffled by the rails brogrammers who got their thrills annoying zed shaw with penis pull requests in github. Then they moved onto the next shiny piece of shit, nodejs, and made that kind of sucky too.

from shit, you can grow flowers. from diamonds, not. :-)

if you feel more comfortable with other tools/stacks, then good for you. other people managed to build successfull apps with rails, node and even PHP! you just need to know what you're doing and do it well.

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