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DHH answers: What makes Rails a framework worth learning in 2017?

by gavingmiller on 1/24/17, 8:35 PM with 130 comments

• by meesterdude on 1/24/17, 9:09 PM

  This reinforces what I see a lot too - people creating yet another XYZ, but rarely I see someone go and create an integrated solution to streamline development processes or make things easier or clearer.

  There are a lot of vocal people who make it seem like you should be doing everything in Go or Angular or what have you, but I want nothing to do with either, and do not have problems that those are meant to solve. I love ruby, and I love rails.

  DHH regularly sounds the drum of rationality - in a community at large of idealists and extremists. He is the reason I got into programming, and constantly serves to remind me that what I'm doing is, in fact, perfectly fine; and that everyone else puts up with a lot of nonsense for no great reason.

  There are other frameworks out there, but you'd be hard pressed to find one with a leader that has such a sense of direction and reason for why the framework does what it does, and does not.

• by vinhboy on 1/24/17, 10:01 PM

  > formalizing conventions, eliminating valueless choices, and offering a full-stack framework that provides great defaults for anyone who wants to create a complete application

  Maybe I've drank the kool-aid too much, but I agree with this whole-heartedly.

  It reminds me of when I want to paint a room. I can go to Home Depot and spend an hour picking out all the tools I need, or I can buy one of those pre-packed toolkit and get to the actual painting immediately.

  Rails + Heroku = My product will be ready to demo by end of the week.

  Obviously this mentality only applies to people like me who wants to get things done quickly. People who value craftsmanship and specificity should do what pleases them. (That's not to say you can't do quality work with pre-packed toolkits)

• by throwanem on 1/25/17, 12:04 AM

  Rails showed us all that web development didn't have to be PHP and Apache and constant headaches. Node and Phoenix and the modern paradigm in general wouldn't have come into existence, or achieved the popularity they have, without an act like Rails to follow. That's awesome, and I respect it for that.

  But can it truly be said that Rails has a purpose today? Its default performance remains lousy with any kind of load. Its convention-first approach means Rails knowledge doesn't easily generalize, as can be seen in this very comment thread from the experience of those who've approached the Node ecosystem as though it were "Javascript on Rails". The "history? what history?" attitude of its BDFL and his clique makes cause for trepidation out of the prospect of maintaining a Rails app over a significant length of time. And even by comparison with ES5, Ruby is a hot mess.

  I get that DHH has to defend it. It's his baby, after all. But it's been a long time indeed since Rails had anything unique to offer beyond an ideology which is, in its own way, every bit as much a straitjacket as RMS' - and Rails' inheritors have innovated in ways that straitjacket makes it very hard at best for Rails to match.

• by eranation on 1/24/17, 10:20 PM

  I completely agree on one aspect, anywhere I go, the kitchen sink is missing. You want to compress responses? well, there is an npm / jar / pip library for that. Want to have ORM? just npm / pip / "your package manager here" and you are done.

  You can say a lot about Rails but I like the idea that everything I commonly need as a web developer is most likely already in the framework, and there is usually a best practice way to do things. Options are great, but moving out of plumbing and into generating value to customers is still having a value.

  If you don't like opinionated, batteries included solutions then Rails is not for you.

  However there are other solutions that kind-of cloned some aspects of Rails. Playframework (Scala has a lot more similarities to Ruby IMHO than to Java, at least in philosophy). Also Spring Boot or JHipster (Spring boot + Yeoman - super opinionated)

• by bobbytherobot on 1/24/17, 11:00 PM

  Maybe Rails has changed from when I last used it five years ago, but I dealt with many of the issues DHH makes against other technology.

  > That people spent hours, if not days, just setting up the skeletons. The basic build configurations.

  I spent hours everyday getting the asset pipeline to work, or it would break again, meaning I would have to fix it again.

  > The vast majority of activity today is for yet another option on the a la carte menu.

  Every week the developers want to switch out some module for another module within Rails because it was the hot new thing.

  Maybe I worked on a bad project. Maybe I didn't get it. Maybe it was a growing pain that has passed. Rails was a pain in the ass to get to work. The ORM was cool, but did it save me time or mistakes from writing SQL - no.

  I would love other people's opinions who have stuck with Rails.

• by currywurst on 1/24/17, 9:33 PM

  I admire the way DHH writes .. confident and persuasive.

  However, I'd just like to point out that in the same span of time JavaEE has undergone significant simplification (omakase API standards, anyone ;)) and if you check out the work of Adam Bien, you'll quickly find old myths of bloated memory consumption and fiddly XML configuration debunked.

  Java is also lucky to have a parallel full-featured stack in the Spring ecosystem. Projects like JHipster do an opinionated take on how to wire things up and take you to quickly to orbit.

  So basically, I disagree with DHH that there is "Very little activity in integrated solutions."

• by newsat13 on 1/24/17, 9:33 PM

  So, I have seen rails code and I did not fall in love with the code. Instead what I saw just black magic and all sorts of conventions. Reminded me of perl. You have to invest a lot of time knowing all the magic stuff.

• by dharamgollapudi on 1/24/17, 8:42 PM

  Its DHH, not DDH. Mods, please update the title.

• by cutler on 1/25/17, 12:57 AM

  Maybe a more relevant question is whether Rails is worth learning if you're looking for a job. Searching Indeed.com's API by title, which removes duplicates, there are currently 133 Rails jobs in the USA compared with 763 PHP (excl. WP, Drupal etc.) and 467 Node.js. In the UK there are 104 Rails jobs compared with 1013 PHP (excl. WP, Drupal etc.) and 230 Node.js. However, if you deleve deeper it turns out that half of the Rails jobs are in London. Outside the capital there are 22 PHP jobs to every Rails job (35 including WP, Drupal etc.) and 3 Node.js jobs to every Rails job so it would appear that unless you have a particular preference for the Ruby language Rails is not a good bet in today's job market.

• by elcapitan on 1/24/17, 10:25 PM

  Rails has become so much more enjoyable since all the hipsters left for node.js. [What makes Rails a framwork worth learning in 2017]

• by mountaineer on 1/24/17, 10:56 PM

  DHH also answers a few other questions about Ruby and Rails in the same Q&A

  https://www.quora.com/session/David-Heinemeier-Hansson/1?sri...

• by mark_l_watson on 1/24/17, 11:03 PM

  I have been thinking of rails lately. I used both Rails and Merb way back when, but for many years now I have just used Ruby + Sinatra.

  I wish that I had a more complex web app to do because it would be fun to get reacquainted with Rails. That probably won't happen since I have been going it the opposite direction, having updated a few Sinatra and PHP sites to be 100% static, and using cloud storage and CDNs.

• by horsecaptin on 1/24/17, 10:45 PM

  Ember.js attempts to do what the front-end what Rails has done for server-side application development. Worth a look, if you're trying to choose between React / Angular / something else.

• by Glyptodon on 1/24/17, 10:34 PM

  The only thing I'd really take much issue with is the "provides great defaults" statement made in passing. There are several things that are defaulted more to what I'd call "lowest common denominator" than "great." For example, sessions.

• by hhandoko on 1/25/17, 12:27 AM

  > You get to use Ruby, which [...] remains the most extraordinarily beautiful and luxurious language I’ve yet to encounter.

  I've used Ruby sporadically as gap-fill in small projects, but I didn't feel the language has any qualities that sets it apart from others.

  Perhaps I missed something, any Ruby devs care to comment?

• by patsplat on 1/24/17, 10:02 PM

  Each user today commands a personal fleet of many devices. "You get to use Ruby" is a weak justification for a monolithic architecture.

• by spoiledtechie on 1/25/17, 12:51 AM

  This answer sounds a lot like what Microsoft's answer to Java was. C#. Everything in this answer reminded me of c#.

• by rco8786 on 1/24/17, 10:54 PM

  What does Ruby have to do with immutability

• by blueside on 1/25/17, 12:56 AM

  I think Rails is always worth learning, but is it worth learning right now if you want to find a job?

• by ahallock on 1/24/17, 11:15 PM

  Here's a reason: money. Rails is still very popular, so there's plenty of work out there.

• by holydude on 1/25/17, 7:33 AM

  What stack do you recommend if not rails for a person that dislikes JavaScript (well rather ecosystem than the language / syntax itself) ? I love Rails and Ruby do not take me wrong but I am not sure if the sole existence of Rails can make Ruby relevant in 2017.

  In terms of jobs prospects and similarity to Rails/Ruby what do you guys recommend ? Java ?

• by vcryan on 1/24/17, 8:52 PM

  It's always important to study history :)

• by 0xsnowcrash on 1/24/17, 9:33 PM

  Rails, as any backend system such as Drupal or Symfony, is inevitably a dead end technology.

  The web is increasingly moving frontend and the system of 2018 onwards will simply be the M in MVC.

  Note, I'm not saying Rails is not worth learning. I'm just saying it's now the Cobol of web technology.