alt Hacker NewsI love Rails, but after working for a few places with huge Rails codebases and then several other places with .NET and other frameworks with actual typing, I just can't go back to Rails for anything that isn't a personal project.
Working with a large codebase with an untyped codebase is just a nightmare, even with powerful IDEs like RubyMine that are able to cover some of the paint points. I wonder how good Sorbet is these days, though, especially the RoR experience
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What is it about large untyped codebases that make it a nightmare?
I worked with Rails a lot. In my experience, every rails dev who is fanatical about how much they love Rails, also has little to no experience with strong types. Of the ones who later try types, they no longer love Rails. Personally I quit Rails entirely because of lack of types. No, RBS and Sorbet are not even close to good enough.
Also, every enterprise rails app I've seen (seven, to date) has been really poorly written/architected in a way that other backends just weren't. Even the fairly new ones felt like legacy code already.
Same. Also became a .net developer after almost 20 years of Ruby/Rails.
Nowadays C# is anyways much more expressive than before. Meanwhile Ruby is still very slow.
Not to mention how poorly maintained are most Rails projects. People have been "vibe coding" forever.
A well-organized and maintained Rails app is great though. I'd definitely consider working with it again, but it really depends on what company it is.
I’ve worked in two places now with Ruby Sorbet servers. Ruby always drives me nuts how things are just in-scope and we don’t know why or where they came from.
I certainly wouldn’t want to go back to working in dynamic languages without typing on top. That takes too much brain power, I’m too old for that now.
I would say Sorbet seems more “basic” than something like Typescript. It handles function calls matching signatures, potential nulls, making sure properties actually exist, that kind of thing. Whereas TS can get quite abstract, and at times you’re fighting to convince it that a value actually is the type you say it is.
TS is very powerful and expressive, to the point that it’s possible to do computation within type code. I’m not convinced I always need that power, or that it’s always more help than hindrance.
Rust/Loco is unironically the most interesting framework right now.
Loco follows up the Rails formula pretty closely, and makes easier to learn Rust by taking care of a load of boilerplate code.