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Ask HN: Stick with Flask or Learn Ruby on Rails?

14 points by methochris ↗ HN
I have a hobby project I have been working on for years now. When I started it I had just learned some Python & was trying my hand at dynamic webdev with flask. I've jumped off it & onto other projects over the years but have recently decided it is a great idea that I want to focus on & bring to the mainstream.

There is way too much 'learning cruft' everywhere in my code and some functionality I want to changed so am starting fresh with some more recent boilerplate. My problem started when I went to update dependencies & found that several of the flask extensions I rely on have not been updated in a very long time (years). And adding salt to the wound is I have found several of them have been forked by someone saying like 'i had to fix this thing about the original extension so just made my own copy of it'. i honestly can't tell if flask & it's extensions are just so rock solid that they don't need to be touched or if half of it is just abandoned or in maintenance mode.

so, ruby on rails. I am a one-man shop and don't have time to be keeping up with my framework and I love the idea that there is a committed group out there making sure this framework stays updated and on top of any issues. i like that every thing I could need to do with my app has been well thought out and thorough documentation/tutorials provided for it. i can't help but think that investing a few weeks to convert my knowledge of python/flask to ruby/rails is going to save me months on the back-end. but i'm really afraid to let go of all the time i have invested in the flask-version of my app. all the query syntax and work-arounds and utility functions i have built up will all need to be converted over. it seems like a horribly daunting task. my gut tells me it would be worth it but my mind tells me to just move forward with what I have and deal with the consequences when/if they get here.

HN, what would you do?

11 comments

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msie
Yes! Definitely! For all the reasons you stated. Dealing with neglected frameworks sucks.
iurisilvio
Stick with Flask. I don't think it is a good reason to change. To be fair, you'll have the same maintenance issue with any language/framework. Some are better maintained, but I think Flask/Django/RoR are in the same league.

I'm a huge Flask user, with projects with 50+ Flask extensions installed. Most of them I just plugged in and never had issues. Some issues I had were easy to patch and most of them were fixed upstream.

You have some complex extensions, but a lot of them are just small wrappers, so it is possible it's just good enough and feature complete.

methochris
50+ flask-specific extensions? can i see your requirements.txt? i must know what i am missing
cyberferret
The same issues seem to happen across the board, no matter which platform. I use a Ruby framework for most of my development (not Rails, but a Sinatra based one), and keep finding that gems my apps depend on can quickly become stale and abandoned all over the place.

Kind of disconcerting to go to Github to lodge a suspected bug report on a gem we use every day, and see that the last commit was 6 years ago!

methochris
disconcerting is definitely a good word for it. i have this sense that if i just stick with the core rails framework than at least all the basic functionality i could need are very unlikely to be abandoned. with flask its like every tiny aspect of the functionality is relying on 20 different individuals whom may or may not have really known what they were doing in the first place and/or aren't around to keep up with it and keep it updated for whatever base dependancy they wrapped around. flask is just so much hacky wrapping and scabbing on. my gut doesn't trust it to grow big with
CCing
You'll will find the same problems in rails community(and I guess in nodejs community too)

Learn to program and do it yourself if you don't find a library/gem. THIS is the solution (anyway in any platform/framework you'll have the 'main' libraries/gems updated...)

Stuck with what you know better and hack a product.

RUG3Y
Flask is awesome, the code is very readable and transparent. I'm not a fan of Rails because of all the "magical" things that happen. Of course, smarter people than I use Rails and have great results, but I'll stick with Flask. Side note, Flask has really great source code too. I learned a ton from reading it.
methochris
i'm getting the sense that rails is just doing so much automatically for you that, without understanding, seems like magic but once you learned what/why/when/how it's really just saving you the effort of doing it all yourself.

i do love flask itself but something about tacking on all the extensions to build it up to be a full-size framework feels super hacky to me...

dermybaby
How do you like developing on Rails? You have the value of past experience with Flask - does the 'newer' approach of RoR work for you?

Can you try rewriting in RoR/Elixir/NewShiny to see if that feeling goes away? Would you lose clients because of the switch to RoR?

All good items to ponder - that would be my thought process.I hope it helped.

methochris
I'll be honest, Rails has a lot of magic going on that makes me uncomfortable but at the same time i desire because it would save me alot of time not have to explicitly spell it all out myself. this is part of my dilemma is whether i should sacrifice absolute control for the timesaving of trusting others and learning to do things their way instead of me hacking it together however i see fit. again, gut vs brain pulling me in different directions.

i guess i do have the "benefit" of having no clients i would lose by switching. just my own time and the potential that i'd have a harder time tackling future issues involving magic i dont understand