[HN Gopher] I'm Back, Ruby on Rails
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       I'm Back, Ruby on Rails
        
       Author : sharms
       Score  : 23 points
       Date   : 2024-08-13 00:59 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.wildcat.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.wildcat.io)
        
       | xtracto wrote:
       | My company "inherited" some medium-sized Ruby on Rails codebase,
       | and OMG what an abomination it is. Everything is "magic",
       | everything is implicit and to find out what does what is
       | horrible. I've done Ruby development in the past (production API
       | with Sinatra) and it was OK, but I'll never start a "real life"
       | project in Rails.
        
         | ninetyninenine wrote:
         | Good to start bad to inherit.
         | 
         | I think the key is that ruby is good for kickstarting a
         | business and getting it to a state where the business runs with
         | high execution speed and minimal effort.
         | 
         | Once the business is operational and stable then continuing
         | from there is bad. Usually you will have to change the entire
         | stack and of course from certain perspectives this can be seen
         | as a lack of foresight.
         | 
         | But if you chose to use another technology to start it could be
         | that the speed of execution just wasn't fast enough and your
         | business never reaches that island of stability because the
         | technology just wasn't fast enough.
        
         | coffeecloud wrote:
         | Read through the Rails docs and you'll learn all the "magic" is
         | pretty easily explainable, mostly just predefined naming
         | conventions and directory structures and a bunch of
         | preconfigured gems.
        
         | desireco42 wrote:
         | You should inheris js or next project to feel the real pain :)
         | nothing hurts as much...
        
           | throwaway48540 wrote:
           | On the other hand, inheriting a proper TypeScript project is
           | nothing but joy.
        
         | ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
         | Rails indeed has magic but the way Vercel has taken over React
         | and the javascript ecosystem, it is really sad. The author
         | makes some good points about the upselling and the javascript
         | devs are so used to it that they pay the shipfast guy $299 to
         | configure their project which makes the shipfast guy high 5
         | figure profits every month. Just for selling configuration. I
         | kid you not.
        
       | UweSchmidt wrote:
       | When I learned about Rails a long time ago I thought the idea of
       | MVC, scaffolding, creating the database, code and frontend that
       | works, i.e. a basic application was genius, but hasn't quite
       | caught on it seems.
       | 
       | Communities for RoR or Microsoft MVC could have created templates
       | for all kinds of applications, and parameters with best-practice
       | implementations of useful stuff like "jwt webtoken" could have
       | been added and maybe implemented to work across different
       | application templates?
       | 
       | Maybe there are good reasons why this is not feasible on a
       | fundamental, technical level, but maybe that's just a path not
       | travelled, as the open source spirit fizzled out and people tried
       | for their own unicorn app.
        
         | horsawlarway wrote:
         | I mean... This is basically exactly what Microsoft tried.
         | 
         | Template out your app, create the pieces through wizards,
         | reduce developer need to interact with the underlying tech and
         | make complicated choices in favor of best practice defaults.
         | 
         | It was... mostly horrible (and I think this pain is where RoR
         | is right now). The problem is that templates go stale awfully
         | fast, tech changes, best practices change, good defaults
         | change.
         | 
         | Keeping a coherent codebase where the developers don't have an
         | understanding of the choices that have been made is recipe for
         | disaster. It _always_ ends up mattering, because often best
         | practices depend on top level objectives and aren 't
         | objectively correct, but rather trade-offs.
         | 
         | RoR does what the author needs - it quickly bootstraps a tech
         | company. The trade-off is that it sucks so hard in year 5.
         | 
         | You get an easy start and a miserable middle. That's probably a
         | trade most startups should make, but as a person who has to
         | inherit that junk... Wow is it painful.
        
       | bitwize wrote:
       | Fast and unbreakable eh? Sounds like a job for Go without a
       | framework.
        
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       (page generated 2024-08-14 23:01 UTC)