DEV Community

Alexander P.
Alexander P.

Posted on

Is it worth it to learn Sinatra in 2018?

Hi, I tried to use rails and django but they both seem difficult to understand for me, I found Sinatra for ruby and it seems easier for me. Well as you know Ruby is really old and I'm not sure if i should learn Sinatra. What do you guys think?

PS: This is my first ever article on DEV, I'm sorry If I did anything wrong.

Top comments (7)

Collapse
 
ghost profile image
Ghost • Edited

Hi Alexander,

Welcome to Dev.to! Sinatra is a simple and well-proven framework to learn and I would HIGHLY recommend adding it to your Ruby toolbox. I use it quite often to develop rock-solid web services quickly in Ruby. I notice you called Ruby "old". Well, Ruby may be older than some other "modern" languages but it is stable and solid and THAT is what clients want. In my 35 years of developing software, I have only used about 5 languages regularly and seen many come and go. Ruby is not going anywhere. Each language has its own strengths and weaknesses and excels in specific circumstances. When a language becomes "mature" like Ruby, you don't get hardly any "gotchas" like you do in new buggy languages. So don't fall for the "it's newer so it has to be a better" argument. It's rarely true.

Good luck to you!

Collapse
 
pcrunn profile image
Alexander P.

Will keep that in mind. Thanks for your time

Collapse
 
rhymes profile image
rhymes

Hi Alexander,

you did nothing wrong!

I don't know how I feel about Sinatra, I've never used it but I've used other micro frameworks, like Cuba for Ruby or Flask (my favorite) for Python.

Another microframework I heard mentioned is Hanami.

I think Sinatra is the most popular among the ones in Ruby.

You're right in saying that Rails and Django are more complex.

I guess that, as always, it depends on what you want to accomplish.

The good thing about microframeworks is that they are less "magic" and you can understand how the whole request, response cycle works.

The great thing about microframeworks is that if you write your code well you can more or less switch from one to another without too much effort.

Have fun!

Collapse
 
jeremy profile image
Jeremy Schuurmans

Absolutely. And I just wanted to say as well that I definitely didn't mean to imply that you were wrong in any way. Just because I'm a fan of Rails doesn't mean everyone else has to be. Good luck! I thought Sinatra was really fun when I learned it, so I hope you enjoy it as well.

Collapse
 
pcrunn profile image
Alexander P.

Thank you very much. I'll search more about cuba and Hanami.

Collapse
 
jeremy profile image
Jeremy Schuurmans • Edited

I agree completely. I would say don’t give up on Rails, and definitely learn Sinatra. It’s hard to deny that it’s valuable to be able to work with Rails, and learning Sinatra first can help you understand what’s going on behind the scenes in Rails. At least for me, that made it less confusing.

Collapse
 
pcrunn profile image
Alexander P.

Well, I don't know. I guess I can give it a shot again.