Video: Make Ruby Great Again

http://blog.testdouble.com/posts/2016-05-09-make-ruby-great-again.html

by searls • 10 years ago

59 6 10 years ago

blog.testdouble.com

orta• 10 years ago

I'm in the iOS community mainly, though my work touches quite a lot of ruby. This talk starts out pretty funny, but focused on a testing library, then moves out to a larger discussion on the merits of working in a mature ecosystem - even when it's not so new and sparkly anymore. That really starts to hit home arrow d 25m, so if you're not a rubyist but are interested, it might be worth starting there.

The discussion around making it interesting to work with mature toolsets makes this a fascinating talk, I still write Objective-C quite often - and would still use ruby to build my next website. The trade-offs are tough there, as you're aiming for stability in the face of a million FOMO blog posts about the newest functional protocol oriented widget.

rhsmoke• 10 years ago

Ruby is great for so many reasons, keeping it great is a no brainer.

dragonwriter• 10 years ago

I prefer text to video, but I assume this is about Donald Trump's campaign to replace Matz?

jamon51• 10 years ago

One of the slides shows "Rails is still the best choice for entire classes of apps."

"Best" is of course usually subjective, and this could spawn huge internet arguments back and forth about the relative merits of various solutions. But I think there's perhaps an objective argument to be made that this isn't true now, and won't be true with Rails 5 and beyond.

I own a web + mobile app dev shop (Infinite Red). Our background is Rails, and some on our team have been using Rails since pre-1.0 (Steve Kellock, for example wrote the first Rails guides, and his name still appears on the website). We have loved Rails (and Ruby) for a long time.

But the concurrency and scalability difficulty of Rails isn't just an opinion. As we've built larger and larger applications on Rails, the amount of effort put into making Rails scale gets disproportionately high. Not to mention server costs.

Yes, it's totally possible to scale Rails. No, not every Rails app needs to scale to Twitter-level. We get that; we've been doing both for years.

When we discovered Elixir/Phoenix [cue the groans, sorry] it felt like we kept the magic of Ruby on Rails while (in a single stroke) we also made a giant leap forward in concurrency, scale, and reliability. In my opinion, this is the direction the Rails community would be better off going. We felt so strongly about this that my partner Ken Miller wrote a piece titled "Phoenix is Rails 5". https://shift.infinite.red/phoenix-is-rails-5-f6d28e57395#.1...

We don't need Ruby on Rails to be great again. It's done its job and we're all better for it and grateful for it. We don't have to become Node.js developers and abandon all the things we love about Ruby and Rails. We have a better alternative: Elixir/Phoenix.

nafaabout• 10 years ago

Ruby is great, it's the first choice in my list for any new application, it may not be the final choice, but at least it's always the first choice to consider. I love it, and I didn't found another tool to replace it on every level. People always get impressed by the hypes, and they like new things, but not every technology that comes can completely replace previous ones.

davetron5000• 10 years ago

I was the third engineer hired at Stitch Fix, and Ruby and Rails has been a key part of our success as an engineering team. We spent the first 12 months delivering value and keeping up with the business. We didn't spend time dealing with tool selection, choosing plumbing options, or any of that and it was key in establishing our team as a partner in the business (as opposed to just being the IT shop). I can't imagine a startup using anything else(), especially early on. While we may replace parts of our code with more specialized tools, Ruby and Rails will continue delivering value for quite some time.

() certainly if your domain is something specialized, this statement makes no sense.

Video: Make Ruby Great Again

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