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Ask HN: Is Ruby on rails worth it to learn in 2022?

by ahmaman on 1/21/22, 11:42 AM with 21 comments

• by johntdaly on 1/21/22, 11:57 AM

  Yes, Ruby on Rails is worth learning. Especially if you are a JavaScript guy, a solo found and interested in the developer experience. Ruby and Rails give you a nice dev experience in my opinion and the way you use Ruby changed the way I do JavaScript too. You can also be rather productive as a solo developer in Rails so I think it is a perfect fit for you. Down the road when you are comfortable with Ruby and Ruby on Rails you might want to look into Python too. Not so much for web development but there are a lot of devops tools out there that use Python.

  My background: I was a Python dev that worked PHP because that was the jobs I got (more than 10 years ago) and decided to invest more into JavaScript (2007) because I though it was going to be the future. When I couldn’t stand PHP anymore I got a Ruby job (because, still no Python web jobs back then) and it changed me fundamentally. I love Ruby and Rails till this day and Ruby, JavaScript and Python form the backbone languages.

• by kadomony on 1/21/22, 2:23 PM

  It’s a very solid, albeit opinionated choice. Obviously, you’ll have haters criticizing its speed (e.g., “wHy NoT uSe Go”), but you’ll learn from a large community of devs that share great conventions (often making things much easier to maintain or change).

  It’s also an amazing choice for launching an MVP because it handles, well, near everything.

  For a novice developer, it’s one of my top recommendations for getting experience across the full gamut of web development.

• by karmakaze on 1/21/22, 5:39 PM

  I'm surprised that no one has suggested Elixir with Phoenix framework. It is a modern re-imagining of Ruby/Rails with the Elixir language created by a former Ruby/Rails developer. It runs on the same BEAM VM as Erlang and has the same concurrency and distributed process supervision capabilities.

  Being not as popular as Ruby/Rails I wouldn't recommend it for anyone who isn't comfortable researching some answers that aren't immediately found in search results.

• by rozenmd on 1/21/22, 1:28 PM

  As someone that bet on Django early in their career before moving to angular.js and finally landing on React/Node.js: yes!

  While I wouldn't personally use it for my own projects (since I'm productive in React/Node), if I had to start fresh again with what I know now, I'd pick Ruby on Rails.

• by weatherlite on 1/21/22, 12:46 PM

  The other big one that comes to mind is Laravel (PHP), heard good things. Node doesn't really offer the whole batteries included experience to this day, at least not as consistent as good as Rails does. I'm sticking with Rails.

• by ptttr on 1/21/22, 3:26 PM

  I went from Ruby on Rails, then Javascript/Typescript to finally land at Clojure in 2019 and I'm not looking back.

  Clojure has been a perfect fit for my needs, very similar to what you describe, and neither Rails nor JS have been able to match that.

  With Clojure/Clojurescript you get:

  - sane, single lang for both backend and frontend (much more seamless than JS/node),

  - REPL-Driven-Development - immediate feedback loop translating to huge productivity boost,

  - a very refreshing approach to programming,

  - access to both two largest ecosystems JVM, npm and of course clojure's own amazing libraries,

  - vibrant and diverse community, converging people from all different programming backgrounds,

  - much, much more.

  Rails and Django are a bit tied to 2005ish MVC paradigm and while it's reliable and gets job done, it comes with compromises on flexibility and user experience - making it hard to be competitive in 2022 as a solo founder. Clojure on the other hand is known for empowering single/few developers to outcompete much larger teams.

  Seriously, forget about Rails and Django and just focus on Clojure.

• by jmarchello on 1/21/22, 8:17 PM

  Yes, Especially for a solo founder, Rails is an effective and powerful choice. It scales from "Hello World" to IPO and allows you to do 10x the work while focusing on your users rather than boilerplate and plumbing. Its also trusted by some of the biggest tech platforms such as GitHub and Shopify.

  The creator of rails recently wrote a great article on how Rails is the perfect choice for solo founders here: https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-one-person-framework-711e6318

  I also recently wrote a short article about how enjoyable it is to work in Ruby and Rails here: https://jmarchello.com/a-love-letter-to-ruby-and-rails

  If you have any questions or want to talk more about learning Rails, DM me on twitter @j_marchello. I'd love to help.

• by andrewdubinsky on 1/21/22, 2:54 PM

  I agree it's great for solo founders, but it also fits well with small teams that cover a lot of ground. When your team has to handle all the IT responsibilities, it's really excellent.

  Hotwire is new, but it seems to cover the gap between applications that need modern front-end components, but don't need all the react/api/etc...

• by dyeje on 1/21/22, 2:37 PM

  If you're looking to solo found, yes Rails and Django are both great choices that will let you build extremely quickly.

• by richardkmiller on 2/1/22, 3:34 AM

  I'm a solo Rails developer and I'm very happy with the productivity. ActiveRecord, as an example of Rails's power and opinionatedness, is extremely powerful. As an abstraction, it does occasionally "leak", and you have to look under the hood, but the ability to compose together code that compiles down to SQL is so much better than trying to compose together strings of SQL.

  I think it's also worth looking at the Rails front-end story. StimulusJS is one of my favorite parts of the Rails stack (though totally usable elsewhere). Instead of ever again writing an event listener in JavaScript, you can write it inline in your HTML, using data-* attributes. It is to JavaScript what Tailwind is to CSS. I heard DHH in a podcast talk about the value of seeing your actions directly in the HTML, not needing to open your JS file to know what's going on. Stimulus and also Turbo definitely have an interesting place in the world and are extremely powerful when they're a good fit. On the other hand, I've still had use for React at times.

  Outside of Rails, I'm excited to try Remix (https://remix.run/) because of its batteries-included approach and what seems like a novel approach to server-side rendering without all the work.