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

[matthew nash]

First time poster, and silent admirer of Ruby and the effect its had on my career.

Tiptoeing round your question about CRUD apps, what resonates is the issue around choice and Ruby’s popularity.  I sympathise with you folks involved in pure web development, serverside or otherwise, as things are now overwhelming.

In my job, i’m lucky enough to use ruby.  Used it for 8 years to parse rows of fiddly csv data.  I also use it for webdriver test automation, and now AWS Lambda functions.  I’ve never touched rails, but only because i’ve never needed to.

I’ve been guilty of worrying about this popularity/job prospect question too much in the past.  “Ooh ruby is down on itjobswatch”.  “Maybe i should start using Node. Maybe Go or powershell. I’ll dust off my python knowledge maybe.”
 But the same thing always happens... i just go back to using Ruby...
A) because i’m a dad of 2 and need to be objective with my spare time.
B) in terms of productivity, it still reigns supreme.  It can declaratively express my intentions better than any other lang.

Its the little things that add up!!
Quick ranges with (...)
Sugar for string arrays, %w()
Enumerable on all collections.
Whitespace freedom
Tons of built in methods.
Variable assignments are values

And many more...so many benefits that you discover while trying to use a different lang to solve the same problem.

I dont think the stranglehold that java and c# have will ever fade, and i’ve stopped caring.  I’ve seen little widespread awareness of the benefits of ruby when i’ve been for interviews.  Thats just the way, but I’ve felt very positive about Ruby lately.  AWS has given a good opportunity to Rubyists by supporting it natively on LAMBDA and so I hope we’ll begin to see more heterogeneous code bases. Ruby functions living alongside Node, Python et al in one domain.  In step, we’ll see no more job adverts stating “must have java experience”.
Even if this isnt the future, i can’t imagine using any other language for what i do and so i’ll keep spreading it’s message.  What is that message?  I guess it’s the same one i saw when i attempted (and failed) the first ruby quizz question. “use ruby, live longer”.

Matt

Sent from my iPhone

On 18 Jan 2019, at 19:21, Mark Burns <markthedeveloper at gmail.com<mailto:markthedeveloper at gmail.com>> wrote:

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<mailto: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<mailto: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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