A Love Letter to Ruby and Rails

&gt; If you&#x27;re a developer or entrepreneur about to start a new endeavor, I highly recommend you consider Ruby for that project. You will find it to be a competitive advantage as you will be able to grow and adapt faster and with fewer resources.<p>Like a lot of people in technology, I love to play with new stuff, but as someone who&#x27;s seen things come and go, it&#x27;s really difficult to recommend something other than Rails for most use cases. It&#x27;s got so much that you can just include in terms of libraries and it&#x27;s got a good community with good values. It lets you write down a first iteration that&#x27;s solid and can be incrementally improved on and taken in new directions as the business learns what&#x27;s what.

I&#x27;ve found that Elixir &#x2F; Phoenix has given me the level of productivity &#x2F; flexibility that Rails used to have. Perhaps it&#x27;s not quite on the same level of productivity but long term maintainability seems to be easier in Phoenix, I think from the functional programming aspect &#x2F; lack of magic.<p>Things I love about Phoenix over Rails:<p>- Background &#x2F; periodic jobs are baked into the same runtime as the server. You can install Oban in about 5 minutes and have it generate periodic jobs without any messing around with additional Ruby processes or custom databases (i.e. Redis, although background jobs are great on Postgres these days)<p>- Anything real-time is given to you out of the box. Rails has ActionCable but like the background jobs above, it needs to be setup as a separate process. Livepage makes this very straight forward.<p>- Phoenix sacrifices some of Rails&#x27; magic for verbosity but I think that&#x27;s a better trade off long term.<p>Things I&#x27;ve loved about Rails:<p>- The eco system.

I think other than Rails, it is also worth considering the other full-stack frameworks: Laravel, Django, and Phoenix.<p>I&#x27;ve spent the past year or so on and off building things in Phoenix. Elixir is an amazing programming language, and LiveView is pretty cool. If you are building something complex, I think Elixir and Phoenix solve a bunch of tough things for you out of the box, thanks to the BEAM. However, I find that the sort of websites I like to make are not complex and pretty much are content-based with a tiny bit of CRUD.<p>Because of this, I&#x27;ve lately been exploring Laravel. PHP is pretty much _the_ language for content-oriented sites, and it isn&#x27;t going away anytime soon. I&#x27;ve been looking into CMSes like Statamic and CraftCMS and of course Wordpress. Laravel seems to have as big of a community around it as Rails. I&#x27;ve also noticed that many of the things I&#x27;ve used in the past couple years have come out of the Laravel community, in a sense, such as Tailwinds and Alpine.<p>IMO, most of the frameworks are somewhat interchangeable. The reason why Laravel interests me is because I no longer want to chase new and shiny things. PHP will always be around, and I always tend to like content-oriented sort of business models more. I figure that I might as well embrace the ugliness of PHP and stop thinking about programming languages and frameworks and instead spend my time thinking about what I can make.

I have heard this many times from many different people that I respect. However, I&#x27;m just not experiencing &quot;the joy&quot; after several attempts. Maybe it&#x27;s just not how my brain is wired.<p>It&#x27;s probably not helping that I&#x27;m not starting from a greenfield project. Needing to go through and understand other people&#x27;s code with an out of date Rails and its dependencies have made me spent most of the time on infrastructure. The entire test suite takes 50-60 minutes to complete with a lot of integration tests hitting the database.<p>Do people allocate a certain amount of time just to upgrade Rails? It seems like there&#x27;s an expectation that Rails is 1) used to start quickly with scaffolding (great for hackathons) 2) constantly running app and cared for to not diverge from the latest version<p>At this point, it&#x27;s one of those love-hate dysfunctional relationship with Rails for me

A highpoint in my coding journey was drinking beer with a friend who know Rails, and we built 3 apps in two evenings. It was not just amazing that we could be so productive, but it was so much also fun! The fun as in discovering how Ruby helps you to solve your problems, and not to mention the ridiculous power of Rails. I want to go back.<p>Now I am like a Romulan, all I do is computational computer science with NumPy and Pandas.

I was a big Rails, Ruby and dynamic typing fanboy. But then my project grew in size and I changed my beliefs.<p>I&#x27;d not start a big project in any language without: null-safety, proper sum-types, type inference.<p>Hence I like Kotlin, and KTor seems to be a good Sinatra&#x2F;Flask like in that arena.<p>Another interesting development I find no-code&#x2F;low-code tools for the backend, like Hasura. This allows me to &quot;just expose Postgres over GraphQL&quot; with very little code (mainly configuration). That combined with type-safe client library generation for a typesafe frontend language like Elm gives me all the power I need in a very different paradigm. Something worth considering.<p>Small example Hasura+Elm project: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cies&#x2F;low-code-backend-dockered" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cies&#x2F;low-code-backend-dockered</a>

More power to anyone and everyone who can find a language&#x2F;framework&#x2F;niche that’s enjoyable for them to work with. The feeling of smooth, frictionless, joyful flow is really something special.

It&#x27;s early days but so far I&#x27;ve quite enjoyed my experience with Buffalo (Golang) framework [1], which mostly copies from Rails. Get Go performance and static typing. Definitely some rough patches, but overall still quite an enjoyable experience (so far).<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gobuffalo.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gobuffalo.io&#x2F;en&#x2F;</a>

A lot of people say the same things about Rails. It makes you productive, it&#x27;s incredibly easy to do things, things just work, etc.<p>I have used Rails for most of my career and for a number of side ventures. I have to say I have had a love-hate relationship with it.<p>I love everything people love about Rails (mentioned above). What I hate is how the speed and productivity comes back to bite you later.<p>The code eventually turns into a ball of mud and becomes near impossible to update. You have N-dependencies that depend on Y-dependencies of their own. Different Rails versions or module versions, and you can&#x27;t update one without breaking something else.<p>You eventually live with it, and nothing gets updated but then you want security updates, and sometimes something terrible happens (like the mimemagic catastrophe) that forces you to ham fist updates together and live with some rails engines not working completely. But that&#x27;s ok, because productivity right?

There seem to be only 2 opinions of Ruby+Rails and neither of those opinions are &quot;it&#x27;s fine...&quot;

Rails gives you so much out of the box that it&#x27;s very tempting if your app lies in Rails&#x27; sweet spot.<p>However I&#x27;ve found that as apps grow bigger and accumulate more complex business logic and data flows Rails codebases become increasingly difficult to manage.