For those of you who haven't had the chance to watch yet:
https://www.joshuawood.net/notes/2020-railsconf-dhh-keynote
One of the parts I liked best was this comment on repeating history as an industry:
> The amnesia is partially caused by so many new people entering the industry. They haven’t experienced it any other way.
There are a ton of new people who haven’t been exposed to the joy of Rails because JavaScript is mainstream and/or someone told them not to bother.
The “Rails Way” is completely foreign to many of the new JavaScript developers I’ve met. Don’t assume people get it just because it’s been around forever. Spread the word:
> Ruby is great because you can know a little JavaScript and then jump to Ruby, understand it, and own the full stack.
What do y'all think about the state of Ruby and Rails in 2020?
Rails was the first mvc framework that actually made sense to me. I got into it about 8 years ago and was told “don’t bother” by a lot of people.
Instead I focused on JavaScript. I kinda regret it and miss working with Rails. With the improvements that the GitHub team has made and tools like stimulus/reflex, I can see there being a much greater potential for Rails over the coming year.
But unfortunately there are still unfounded stigmas out there like “Rails is dying” or “Rails can’t scale well” that need to be squashed (at least in some of the enterprise circles I’ve been involved in). We need more evangelism to make people understand that Rails is just as relevant and the tools and ecosystem are just as vibrant as they ever were. Just my $0.02.
I’ve never enjoyed writing code with any other language as much as I have with Ruby, and it’s the same with Rails.
I’m only a few years into my developer career but for me, the good Ruby/Rails code and best practices I’ve seen will always serve as a benchmark for what codebase in other stacks should live up to.
He kept referencing the “majestic monolith,” and I turned it off.
Thanks for posting these notes!
> There are a ton of new people who haven’t been exposed to the joy of Rails because JavaScript is mainstream and/or someone told them not to bother.
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> The “Rails Way” is completely foreign to many of the new JavaScript developers I’ve met. Don’t assume people get it just because it’s been around forever.
This is such an underrated point right now. Really, the revolution that was Rails, is not so much the framework, but the philosophy. The whole ‘Rails is omakase’ analogy, meaning convention > configuration, is sorely missing from a lot of modern web dev.
I personally love the direction and possibilities of JS, but the fact that redwood, gatsby, blitz, etc all seem to be gaining traction, tells me that when push comes to shove, all devs fundamentally has to solve real problems, business problems.
The magic of Rails is how it removes all but what you need to start creating value from day one. And from personal experience, I know that good Rails people with some frontend chops are in very high demand, and I think that’ll be the case for a long while.
I love Rails. I’ve been programming with it since 2006. It made me love programming again. It’s literally changed my life and I’d never trade it in for anything MEAN or MERN or whatever the heck acronym comes next.
I’m too damn productive. Clients love it – especially the ones who pay by the hour!!!!
Many people say rails is great and maybe I will even join them on some days but many of those seem to think rails can’t or shouldn’t be overhauled to make it better.
I think both Ruby and Rails need to be looked at fresh to take them to the next level. For Ruby this means a much faster VM and type checking (optional or not). On the VM front we have been promised one after the other and still no change. Rubinious came and went, jruby didn’t pan out like it was promised and almost nobody uses it and it looks like graal/truffle isn’t coming anytime soon either. The problem is with the language itself There are things about the language like exceptions handling, stack unwinding etc that need to be overhauled in order to make ruby faster. Sorbet may address the type handling but it’s just a band aid and still relies on runtime checking.
Rails takes up way too much memory. It’s also obscene in object allocation and garbage collection overhead. It needs an overhaul to make it efficient and fast.