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Ruby on Rails will be dead soon!

poudyal_rabin on October 26, 2021

Yes! I was also surprised and a little bit agitated when I saw similar headlines on tech blogs and magazines few years back. I thought maybe that's...
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Ben Halpern

People who think Ruby can't serve machine learning use cases for one reason or another should be confused as to why Python is so strong in this arena. Python happens to have more of a culture and ecosystem built around these use-cases vs Ruby, but otherwise it should effectively have the same shortcomings as Ruby.

Ruby on Rails is robust in its webdev tooling and conventions. And generally it is popular enough that it essentially has everything you'd "expect" to use it for.

Happy to always emphasize that if you post on DEV, you're on Rails, and you can inspect every line of code we produce...

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poudyal_rabin

wow! Thanks for your comment @ben !! inspecting code on DEV would be another way to learn more about Rails haha. Thanks for building this platform, it is always exciting to see the products built on tools we personally use day to day. Cheers!!

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deciduously profile image
Ben Lovy
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poudyal_rabin

haha loved the idea of building website just to put NO

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Luke Inglis

Ones of my favs that was put up by a former colleague of mine isperformantaword.com/

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Khadija Sidhpuri
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insidewhy • Edited

Last time I used it you'd need way more cloud resources than other platforms to serve the same number of users. The architecture seemed to just perform really poorly. I loved ruby but was so disappointed with the typesystem they developed. Having to put my types in a separate file is so wrong. I'll never use ruby again.

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poudyal_rabin

@insidewhy You are right too. For such cases Rails will be perfect for building MVP and prototypes.

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insidewhy • Edited

How do you equate "resource hungry" and "terrible static typing system" with "perfect"? Heheh

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Martin Vandersteen

Because you don't care about that when you're building an MVP, what matters is speed to market, code cleanliness and conciseness

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insidewhy profile image
insidewhy

But you probably wanna refactor your MVP rather than rewrite everything for your later releases, so maybe starting from rails isn't a great idea.

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Martin Vandersteen

Really depends honestly. The decision you make for your product in the first years are rarely the right ones for your product of the years after that.
Rewriting will often happen no matter which language you choose once you really start to scale. You don't build an MVP in micro services running on a Kubernetes cluster, that's just over-engineering.
It's a common mistake, but what you think the direction is at the MVP step WILL NOT be the direction a few years after that.

Locking oneself into a specific techno is not good, choose the right ones for the right stages and evolve continuously instead of investing 3x the price in your solid future-proof MVP when 90% of products don't even reach that "future"

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insidewhy

Yep of course, but choosing rails and coding in rails involves flexing a brain muscle that probably isn't worth flexing. Ruby was a lovely language but time hasn't been kind to it. Best off forgetting it now and solidifying better faster, more modern, easier and more flexible languages and frameworks in 2021.

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Martin Vandersteen

Let's just agree to disagree 🤷 To me Rails is the definition of easy, you don't need to flex any muscle since everything is done for you, perfect for fast iteration ! I guess we just had different experiences with it, and that's ok, I don't think it's meant for everyone, just like MacOS's """Simplicity""" can turn off a lot of people (including me).

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insidewhy

No matter how easy something is you're still "flexing". The more you use your brain on any task the more you remember how to do this kind of task and forget other types of task. So using ruby at all anymore is just a waste of thought and training that you could be using on something that actually has a future. Ruby is like an abusive relationship right now. It may feel good but it's letting you down, it's not doing a good job, and it's not going anywhere good. Leave it before it leaves you.

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Martin Vandersteen

Ahaha I see what you mean, a bit dramatic but I get where you're coming from. I agree that Ruby is not objectively the best language to work on in terms of future (pretty good in terms of career though if you can go international, since there's so few of us and no competition, but only works for the next 10 years I guess).

If you like the Ruby syntax and ethos more than the other languages though, just go for it... Life is not always about optimization, it's about having fun as well ! And Ruby is definitely fun 🤡

If you want to optimize your career path like crazy and don't really have any preferences, by all means, go JS, Python, Rust and all that jazz ! I don't really need to optimize my career so I just focus on what I like doing and what makes me happy ☮

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insidewhy profile image
insidewhy • Edited

I really liked ruby too, until they really messed up building a type system. But it's not just about optimising for your career (although that is really important, money makes life easier), it's optimising your present and your future.

I love programming languages so much, and that's why I want to keep evolving, helping my career is just a byproduct of that.

I'm just disappointed the creators of ruby were so bad at evolving the language that it got trounced by things that came about much later. So much wasted promise. If you're enjoying hanging out on your sinking ship then by all means hang around for a bit longer, but don't fool yourself long enough that you drown with it.

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Martin Vandersteen

You can't sink when you have a whole armada of boats 😎

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insidewhy

There's no armada, just a waste of time and a waste of priorities: youtu.be/_F2k1zwDymw

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vdsmartin profile image
Martin Vandersteen

You're pretty stubborn.. I was hinting at the fact that when you work with multiple programming languages, you're golden. No waste of time here

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Tensor-Programming • Edited

This is the kind of post I can get behind. I really dislike it when people say x technology is going to die or Y technology is worse than Z. I'm a polyglot Dev, and I've had the fortune of working in a ton of different domains; languages and other technologies should just be viewed as tools in your tool belt. Yeah sure, there are a few languages that work like hammers and a few that work like socket wrenches but that doesn't mean that one is better than the other; at least not from a general point of view.

I've actually been pretty impressed with the recent additions to Ruby. They added some pretty nice concurrency primitives, and the new compiler is much faster than it used to be. And while I would rarely pick rails for a new project, there certainly are usecases for both Ruby and rails. Also there's a good reason why recently we've been getting new languages that follow Ruby like syntaxes (crystal, nim and elixir for example). It's a nice syntax to work with.

Also if you learn Ruby, it's pretty easy to transition to a language like elixir or python, even something like rust shouldn't be too difficult to gork coming from a ruby background. It's perfectly acceptable for new programmers to get their feet wet with something like rails and there are still plenty of jobs out there looking for rails devs.

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Milan Letić

@dev if I see one more manipulative or false or click bait title like this I wll stop comming back.

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Seiyial • Edited

I saw on my evening news feed, this article, titled "Ruby on Rails will be dead soon!". I was saddened, really saddened; I clicked in to look for official announcements or commentaries on why the Rails team decided to make such a decision... What I got instead was just an unrelated person's meta-OPINION.

DEV is taglined "A constructive and inclusive social network for software developers. With you every step of your journey." I understand that the body of the article may serve some people, but I'm truly disgusted that it allowed such an article to have an unconstructive title that bites off so much more than it was meant to chew.

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poudyal_rabin

thats why you should't judge something too early 😅

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Seiyial • Edited

Wow, so "will be dead soon!" has a different meaning if read slower? 😮

Post reported, goodbye.

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Posandu

No, it's not true! you wrote this blog post on a platform created by Ruby on Rails!

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Pavel Tkachenko

What is the problem to have an application on rails and connected module with machine learning on python?

Rails is infinity scalable. It stateless. You can set up as many app servers as you want. Bottleneck is always a database, but this problem is outside of topic.

IMHO ruby is not good choice for first language to learn. Also applicable for Javascript, Python. I am convinced that the first language should be strongly typed, preferably with the ability to work directly with memory. It is like a math, you may not use it, but it shapes your thinking as a developer.

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Martin Vandersteen

In any case Rails is a strong starting point for learning the MVC Architecture. I started with Rails and I had no trouble switching to Laravel for projects where it made more sense (mainly because of Laravel's ecosystem and Serverless capabilities). Still love Rails though and looking forward to use it again when I get the chance (especially Hotwire).

I don't think Rails is ever a bad choice ! But when you're a web developer you should stay open to other technologies and grow your arsenal so that you always have the right tool for the job at your disposal.

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poudyal_rabin

Hi Martin,
It was the same case for me I was having difficulty learning django at the beginning but it was fairly easy for me to pick up the Rails. Thank you so much for your comment

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Sailor Saturn

Clickbait isn't cool. Get well soon

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poudyal_rabin

thanks 😅

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johnnymccodes

COBOL will be dead soon

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poudyal_rabin

haha rich and dead

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LG

Damn, the gem CLI is what I want, and if Ruby on Rails is dead, I can't use the gem CLI, which is my framework for Jekyll and Bundle.

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poudyal_rabin

don't worry Ruby is not going anywhere this early

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LG

Well, once it's gone how can I use the gem CLI? Are there any alternatives?

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Edmundo Sanchez

Well, the thing is Rails is a huge thing, if you try to build your small project on Rails there is a change you are overdoing it, you are better off with Sinatra.

I learned Rails 3 a while back and never touched it again after finding Sinatra

Starting your blog or personal site with rails is a waste of time, or whatever non-app website, well not a waste if you learn, but technically it is time consuming, you could work faster.
And if it is a small app that only needs a database, you are still better off with Sinatra.

Still Rails is a great framework, build to do anything you want to do, just be sure you actually need it before starting.

It is not going to die though.

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Lewis Cowles

I'm not a fan of Rails, but ruby is far from dead and rails will live on for much the same reasons as WordPress and CodeIgniter, Django, Laravel, Spring boot and a host of other such systems.

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poudyal_rabin profile image
poudyal_rabin

I totally agree with you

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scottshipp

Homebrew is Ruby too, isn't it?

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poudyal_rabin

yes that's right! Homebrew is Ruby

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ortonomy profile image
🅖🅡🅔🅖🅞🅡🅨 🅞🅡🅣🅞🅝

Rails is used as a learning tool on such a high percentage of boot camps. Definitely dead :p

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poudyal_rabin

haha! ya Rails is perfect for someone starting out to learn MVC and all

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Random User

If you want people to respect you, try not using silly click bait headlines like that.

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poudyal_rabin

haha the conclusion is ruby is not dead ✌️

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Ryan B

i remember saw this kind of post / youtube video in 2020

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Robby O'Connor

Excuse me but this is a giant load of horse shit clickbait.

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Robby O'Connor • Edited

What on earth are you smoking? This is the biggest load of bullshit.

This is beyond lazy and just pathetic.