I use Rails for many of my side projects. Because of the emphasis on convention over configuration, Rails codebases tend to be succinct with minimal boilerplate, which keeps context windows small. That in turn makes it great for agent-assisted work.
For web stuff, with server-side rendering and partials it means minimal requirement to touch the hot mess that is JavaScript, and you can build PWAs that feel native pretty easily with Hotwire.
Ruby is slow as fuck though, so there's a tradeoff there.
> More importantly, on CI systems it’s relatively common to check out code using git, and git doesn’t care about mtime
git doesn't care about mtime, but git maintains trees whose hash changes if any constituent part of the tree changes. It'd seem tempting to check for a .git and if present use the git tree to determine whether to invalidate the cache.
byroot sets a great example sharing his code optimization expertise. His blog has many great improvements like this. A 7x improvement in Dir.join and similar calls?! Thank you, byroot!
Makes me miss Ruby. Been in node typescript recently. Everything is a callback returning a promise in some weird resolution chain, mapped and conditional types, having to define schemas for everything and getting yelled at by lsp all day... Oh then you gotta write react components and worry about rerenders and undefined behavior caused by impurity in state, npm, arcane .json configs
Versus active record, mvc, yaml configs, bundler, beautiful syntax, robust and trivially extendable stdlib, amazing native debugging and cli docs out of the box, everything out of the box if you're using Rails
I do not understand why it becomes increasingly irrelevant, especially in web development. I kinda get scripting--bash and python tend to run everywhere
Spot on. The worst thing is digging through 500 lines of nested JSON just to find one tiny type mismatch that broke the build. Most diff tools make it worse by showing 100 changes when 99 of them are just whitespace noise. Really makes you miss the simplicity of Ruby/Rails.
What happened to Ruby? It was very successful at some point.
Maybe kids started using JS exclusively. But what happened to older developers? Did they move over?
Rails seemed to enable very fast prototyping and iteration. Isn't it still the case?
I see PHP usage going down, but PHP doesn't seem to have any advantages over JS, .NET, Python or Go. While Ruby coupled with Rails promised easy and rapid development.
Of course, Ruby might not be best suited for large code bases or microservices but probably 90% of the Internet are small to medium web sites.
nice write-up! I wonder tho - did the optimization really affect CI wall time? In my experience such micro optimization rarely move the needle - it obviously matters because a lot jobs are running in parallel, but did it in the end improved dev experience? (honest question, just curious)
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 24.6 ms ] threadFor web stuff, with server-side rendering and partials it means minimal requirement to touch the hot mess that is JavaScript, and you can build PWAs that feel native pretty easily with Hotwire.
Ruby is slow as fuck though, so there's a tradeoff there.
git doesn't care about mtime, but git maintains trees whose hash changes if any constituent part of the tree changes. It'd seem tempting to check for a .git and if present use the git tree to determine whether to invalidate the cache.
Wow! I'd love to hear more about how that's achieved
Versus active record, mvc, yaml configs, bundler, beautiful syntax, robust and trivially extendable stdlib, amazing native debugging and cli docs out of the box, everything out of the box if you're using Rails
I do not understand why it becomes increasingly irrelevant, especially in web development. I kinda get scripting--bash and python tend to run everywhere
Maybe kids started using JS exclusively. But what happened to older developers? Did they move over?
Rails seemed to enable very fast prototyping and iteration. Isn't it still the case?
I see PHP usage going down, but PHP doesn't seem to have any advantages over JS, .NET, Python or Go. While Ruby coupled with Rails promised easy and rapid development.
Of course, Ruby might not be best suited for large code bases or microservices but probably 90% of the Internet are small to medium web sites.