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

[Mark Burns]

You’ve picked the wrong list for an unbiased opinion.

I might choose Rails myself. And I often do for side projects.

However, I’ll focus on giving you some reasons why not to choose Rails.

Hard to hire and I believe this will continue to be the case. My subjective
opinion is that it’s harder to hire in inverse proportion to the popularity
of the language and it’s productivity. And as interest is somewhat
objectively dwindling I believe this will continue to get worse.

And as it’s productive, businesses can achieve their financial goals more
quickly and pay engineers more to keep them.
So there’s swings and roundabouts.
You can mitigate this by hiring contractors and/or more expensive people,
but some companies do complain about the difficulty in retaining ruby
skillsets.

You’re likely to end up with a heavily coupled codebase. You don’t have to,
and I have some relatively honed practices for avoiding this, but it’s not
The Rails Way. And you’ll find some resistance to decoupling efforts both
from the framework itself and engineers who are used to The Rails Way.

You’re going to still feel like JavaScript is a bit of a second class
citizen. It’s much much better now since webpack integration but it’s still
not the same as working in a pure node environment. And you are going to
build apps that use JavaScript.

Those are some initial thoughts. I’m sure there are a ton more interesting
pros and cons yet to come from the list.

On Fri, 18 Jan 2019 at 18:53, Josep Egea <jes at josepegea.com> wrote:

> 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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