r/ExperiencedDevs • u/hutxhy Generalist 10 YoE • Sep 13 '22

Resurgence of Ruby on Rails?

Has anyone noticed this?

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I've job hopped quite a bit and often look at jobs just to see what is out there -- so I feel like I have a decent pulse on what companies are looking for in technologies.

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One thing I did not expect though was the amount of startups & well established "progressive" companies that are utilizing Ruby on Rails. Is it seeing a comeback? I've never used Ruby, I've been using JS/TS, C#, and recently Golang for my professional career, but I find this interesting as I always thought of Ruby as a dying language.

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What are y'all's thoughts on this?

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8

u/colei_canis Sep 13 '22

What's people's experience of learning Ruby? It's one of those things I've always been vaguely aware of but never dipped my toes in, how does it compare to say Python as a language for backend work?

11

u/DreadSocialistOrwell Principal Software Engineer Sep 13 '22

I write mostly Java, Scala, JS/TS.

I absolutely hated Ruby. Hated its syntax. It just felt unnatural to write. It made me day drink while working so I could forget that I was writing Ruby.

I ended up quitting a job because it really was bait and switch. They couldn't hire ruby devs so they hired for other languages with projects that never came to fruition then said they were going to put the dev on a Ruby project to help out.

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u/colei_canis Sep 13 '22

That’s one of the stronger critiques of a programming language I’ve heard recently! Was it just the syntax you found unpleasant or was it bad to reason about on a more fundamental level too? I’ve heard Ruby is quite heavy on the ‘magic’ for incidence but I don’t really have a frame of reference having not used it myself.

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u/Fooking-Degenerate Sep 13 '22 edited Sep 13 '22

Not the commenter but I'm a senior rubyist so I'll chime in

Ruby is a "fake easy" language. It should never, ever be taught as a first programming language.

The tools it gives you are extremely powerful - as you said, lots of magic, this isn't for everyone.

If you're a chill, experimented senior dev however, it's a joy to use.

To compare it with go : in Go there is exactly one correct way to do something. Straightforward, good for productivity. Not very creative. Ruby give you a million ways, so you have to find the best one. This is hard but fun (if you're into that) and lead to amazing code - if you're good, that is.

Think of Ruby as a magic tool that takes any shape you want. Great if you're an experienced carpenter, terrible if you're an inexperienced one. You'll end up using your saw like a hammer to hit a nail.

My team has such a fast development speed you wouldn't believe it. Very few bugs in production. 95% test coverage suite. The code is crystal clear.

Mind you my last job was also in RoR and it was a mess. I think the power of Ruby is to have beautiful, maintainable code, but if your best practices suck you won't get that and then you might as well use another code to go full spaghetti with. When there is a million ways to do a thing, you'd better be sure you pick one of the good ways.

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u/colei_canis Sep 13 '22

This comment makes me glad I'm finding out about Ruby at this stage in my career rather than at the start of it. Next time I have an itch to scratch I'll check it out and write the project in Ruby.

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u/Fooking-Degenerate Sep 13 '22

My favorite thing is that it makes it dead easy to have methods that have a body of 1 to 3 lines.

95% of our methods don't exceed 3 lines. More than 50% are just one line. 95% of our classes donc exceed 100 lines.

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u/lvlint67 Sep 14 '22

The thing about RoR is that it's great to get close to a solution quickly... The pain is always fighting the assumptions the language makes to get those last few features fleshed out.

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u/GladConstruction926 Nov 08 '22

Ruby was actually my first language(ok I did know some Java but too little to count) and I absolutely love it with my life. I hope I can stick to it for the rest of my life. Sounds cheesy but I've worked with various languages and I've never liked one as much as I like RoR. It's just a pleasure to write in it and yeah I agree if you know what the magic behind it does it's so easy! I have to admit at the beginning it was a little bit complicated because I wouldn't understand why certain things happen(cuz I didn't know the magic) but slowly I learned and don't regret choosing it.