[LRUG] Thoughts on the future of Ruby and Rails?

[Josep Egea]

First message here, so Hi everyone!!

> Taking account the state of technologies, the ecosystem and developers available for hire, if you were to build a new team from scratch to develop a fairly standard B2B CRUD application (something that Rails is good at), would you start building the product and the team around it with Ruby (and optionally Rails) at the core or would you opt for something else? If you would, what would you consider and why?


For a side project, where experimentation and learning are part of the expected outcome, maybe not. With so many new cool languages/frameworks available, it would be difficult not to pick one of the shiny new things out there.

But, for a real project, where productivity is THE target, I'd pick Ruby and RoR more than ever.

Rails is super-mature right now. That means that you'll find excellent support in the framework and surrounding gems to cover most of the needs for a complete site/app. 

But also, and very important, both RoR and the supporting ecosystem are pretty stable right now, so you can expect to spend most of the coding time on features instead of having to constantly update your own code in order to chase the fast pace of evolution and radical change that young frameworks have. I suffered that at the beginning of Rails (1.x, 2.x and 3.x days) and it was a great detractor for productivity.

So, for me, a resounding yes.

Regards
--
Josep

> On 18 Jan 2019, at 17:00, Tadas <tadastamo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Happy Friday LRUG,
> 
> I've seen some articles about Ruby/Rails dying or becoming less attractive over the last few years. On the other hand there are some strong voices that say the language and the framework have matured and are now better than ever.
> 
> I'm not trying to get a scientific proof that either side is correct. While I do think that Ruby an Rails have definitely not gotten worse over time, I also understand that how people feel and talk about the technology do have an impact to the overall ecosystem of the technology. I would be curious to hear your subjective thoughts about the topic from the perspective of the following question:
> 
> Taking account the state of technologies, the ecosystem and developers available for hire, if you were to build a new team from scratch to develop a fairly standard B2B CRUD application (something that Rails is good at), would you start building the product and the team around it with Ruby (and optionally Rails) at the core or would you opt for something else? If you would, what would you consider and why?
> 
> Thanks for your thoughts :)
> 
> Tadas
> -- 
> Tadas
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