> (Really, though, it doesn't matter. Your software stack is almost certainly not going to decide the life or death of your business.)
This is the part that's going to sting.
I suspect, given the general admiration for Paul Graham on YC, many people subscribe (if only unconsciously, and at least to some degree) to the idea that using techno X (where X would be Common Lisp in the case of PG, but everyone will insert their own pet tech here) can _by itself_ make your startup successful.
Whereas the sad truth is that choosing the wrong tech can definitely _kill_ your shop, but choosing the "right" one will not ensure its survival...
The key here though is that choosing a bleeding edge tech is more likely to be a problem because it's fairly untested.
I can tell you what ALL the problems with rails are. For the most part they won't even start to bite you until you hit scaling problems. By the time you hit scaling problems with Rails you can probably afford to pay engineers to solve the scaling problems, and/or port off at that point.
I love sveltekit and use it a bunch for my own personal projects, but it's too immature to recommend to others. Instead I mostly point them at Next.js if they want a javascript stack and Rails if they don't. I have created and maintained apps based on both platforms for 6 and 16 years respectively and know exactly what I'm recommending to people.
I was big on Rails scene when it was huge in 2008, and saw a big exodus from it. I found so many of the "Rails" problems were solved by learning two languages: ruby, and sql. People would go to crazy lengths to avoid looking at the queries they'd actually run. I can admit to not really learning ruby as a language by itself, and can now see how much better my old code would've been if I wasn't just blindly shoehorning Railscasts in there.
Similar problems for people who learned angular but not typescript, laravel but not php, etc.
When software engineers start a business, it's easy for them to hyperfixate on technical decisions because those are the types of problems they understand well enough to optimize.
Yep. The problem with the story of bikeshedding is that it assumes people know bike sheds but not nuclear reactors. There are plenty of cases of people who are great at nuclear reactor design but have no idea how workers should park their bicycles.
I've seen a really interesting pattern play out a few times now.
A startup needs to raise money and hitches onto the latest tech stack that grabs investors' attention. The startup raises on a valuation inflated based partly on the tech stack itself, meaning enough attention isn't given to the actual product or business model. Ultimately the startup runs into money problems when they can't live up to the tech stack hype and the valuation that went with it.
I saw this first hand with a startup picking Plaentscale early on. There's nothing wrong with the product and it solves certain problems really well, but I saw one particular startup grab it early because it was getting a lot of attention and completely missed that the limitations of Planet scale ran smack in the face of what the startup wanted to build.
Rails is absolutely fantastic for projects below 10,000 lines with 1 or 2 contributors, especially if you want a classic forms-based UI. And you can get a huge amount done under those constraints in Rails.
But as of couple of years ago, Rails came with a number of drawbacks:
2. The lack of static typing meant far less IDE support. Fewer documentation tooltips, less autocompletion, etc.
3. I used to do a lot of Rails consulting. And whenever I had to drop into a codebase with more than 50,000 lines or 5 active developers, it was generally a painful slog. Too many weird Rails plugins that stopped being maintained, too much magic, too many nasty surprises while refactoring.
Basically, smaller Rails projects were an absolute delight. Larger Rails projects, though, tended to feel more like a swamp. Tools like https://activeadmin.info/ could tip the balance where applicable.
I still think that small Rails projects are fantastic, and I don't think anything since has remotely matched Rails' productivity within that niche. There's just too much mature tooling, and much of it works together seamlessly. But not too many projects want classic multi-page apps right now, and small projects often grow up to be big projects.
Static typing vs not has clear pros and cons. I do appreciate that JS/TS offers you a choice but I personally prefer Ruby the way it is.
Your other comments are basically:
- ruby/rails has a great 3P package system - oh and yes you can choose "bad" ones
- ruby/rails let's you quickly write great code - oh and yes you can just as quickly write "bad" code
I have worked on a decent number of dynamically-typed Ruby and Python systems in the 50,000 to 250,000 line range, written and maintained by teams. This has never felt like a strong use case for dynamic typing. You end up losing:
- A lot of IDE support. The loss of documentation tooltips, in particular, can be painful in a team environment.
- The ability to change an API and immediately see all the affected code. This affects refactoring speed when making big cleanups. Massive updates I could do in a few hours in Rust might take 2 weeks on a big Rails project.
- Team-wide clarity on exactly what goes into key data structures. Can something be null? Does it allow numbers, or only strings? Etc.
With two developers and a small code base, you can keep most of this information in your head. And Rails is still unmatched for terse, clear code, plus off-the-shelf modules for many common tasks.
I'm not even sure that Ruby could be retrofitted with a really worthwhile type system, to be honest. JavaScript already required a lot of black magic, and in some ways, Ruby is even more dynamic. So perhaps Ruby is better left as-is, even if that makes it a poorer choice for projects that would benefit from static typing.
The pros almost always outweigh the cons these days though for any sizeable project. This may not have been historically true when the performance of IDEs and compilers was worse, but it certainly is true today. I've spent most of my career in dynamic languages but have spent the last year and a half or so strictly in strongly-typed languages. There's a night and day difference in crashes/reliability, refactor-ability, and tooling. Dynamic languages shove all of your validation into runtime where you may or my not be looking when failures occur and refactors are fucking nerve wracking because it's impossible to know if something really doesn't rely on that function or not. Tests can fill this gap, but that's a lot of additional code you now have to write and maintain and refactor and run in your slow af CI pipelines.
A surprising answer to issue 2 is that Copilots are filling in the gap. Rails, VS Code, and Github Copilot work very well. Both for autocomplete and explanation. I expect them to get better as context window size improvements arrive.
One new thing on the table is that AI (github copilot, openai) seems to perform way better on non-statically-typed languages. Anecdotally, the suggestions are way better in ruby than go.
This goes hand-in-hand with the idea of using "boring" technology. If it's mission critical, I'd rather be using something battle-tested than the brand-new hot tech. There's re tooling, more documentation and likely more search-able solutions to whatever problems you may run into.
I strongly agree with the article's points. While I haven't used Rails, I'm a Django developer and have never built something with Rails; I like the benefits of sticking with full-stack frameworks. Rails is a solid choice, but Django, especially when combined with htmx, also enables quick and robust application development.
It's refreshing to read about someone who prefers a straightforward approach (using boring technology) rather than dividing work across multiple teams and technologies. Using a single, full-stack framework not only simplifies the development process but also enhances the overall enjoyment when working :)
I would totally expand "Rails" to "Django or Rails or Laravel or any other well-maintained mature full-stack web framework in the language you are the most comfortable with".
There's a lot of awesome options for boring technology! Even javascript has next.js which is pretty boring at this point, even if it is missing some things.
One ideal setup I have is: Django + htmx + templates with jinja2 (to use macros) and styling with tailwindcss
The good part is that if you start early with a good design, it's fairly clear how to move from views to a REST API (DRF or Django-ninja) later and split the front end if you need to.
I use Lucid which is also maintained by the AdonisJS team (it's built upon Knex). I do development with SQLite then migrate to MSSQL for production (the latter not my choice, but organizational, but it rolls with it just fine). It has served my needs well.
When Rails became popular I started using it on basic web site catalog / e-commerce projects in 2007. It was very difficult to deploy. Thanks to Heroku and other pioneering companies that is different today. However, at the time I left behind PHP and LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) which provided very simple and cheap deployment. Years later I regret that transition from using LAMP to Rails. I wish I had just stayed using PHP, it would have saved a lot of time and difficulty.
Question for people here on HN: Could a similar position to the blog post be taken in 2024, ie "Just use PHP (and LAMP)"?
For web apps maybe. What's the "boring" / productive stack for desktop apps? There's this weird paradox with programming languages which causes unproductive stacks to become more popular because programmers like "difficult" stuff and they also generate more online activity.
> What's the "boring" / productive stack for desktop apps?
I've been trying to find it for years. I've started maybe 5ish desktop apps over the last decade and each time did the dance of "QT can't possibly be it...can it?" And then googled and tried everything I could find. In my experience it's all pretty bad. Unironically the best solutions I've found are either Unity/Godot or Electron.
It seems like you and parent are asking "What is the boring/productive stack for *cross-platform* desktop apps?" And the answer to that question is probably, as you say, something like Electron.
If you pick an OS, I think there are generally good answers. In Windows, it's .NET and C# with Visual Studio as your IDE. On OSX, it's Swift/ObjectiveC and AppKit, with XCode as your IDE. For Linux? idk, is it the year of the Linux desktop yet?
Definitely would love to see more SQLite adoption, but hosting isn't as straightforward as it should be depending on your hosting choice (e.g. Heroku)
Also had slight issues with concurrent writes on SQLite though potentially things like a SQLite per user would be neat especially when it comes to backup/recovery
Readit News
This is the part that's going to sting.
I suspect, given the general admiration for Paul Graham on YC, many people subscribe (if only unconsciously, and at least to some degree) to the idea that using techno X (where X would be Common Lisp in the case of PG, but everyone will insert their own pet tech here) can _by itself_ make your startup successful.
Whereas the sad truth is that choosing the wrong tech can definitely _kill_ your shop, but choosing the "right" one will not ensure its survival...
I can tell you what ALL the problems with rails are. For the most part they won't even start to bite you until you hit scaling problems. By the time you hit scaling problems with Rails you can probably afford to pay engineers to solve the scaling problems, and/or port off at that point.
I love sveltekit and use it a bunch for my own personal projects, but it's too immature to recommend to others. Instead I mostly point them at Next.js if they want a javascript stack and Rails if they don't. I have created and maintained apps based on both platforms for 6 and 16 years respectively and know exactly what I'm recommending to people.
Similar problems for people who learned angular but not typescript, laravel but not php, etc.
A startup needs to raise money and hitches onto the latest tech stack that grabs investors' attention. The startup raises on a valuation inflated based partly on the tech stack itself, meaning enough attention isn't given to the actual product or business model. Ultimately the startup runs into money problems when they can't live up to the tech stack hype and the valuation that went with it.
I saw this first hand with a startup picking Plaentscale early on. There's nothing wrong with the product and it solves certain problems really well, but I saw one particular startup grab it early because it was getting a lot of attention and completely missed that the limitations of Planet scale ran smack in the face of what the startup wanted to build.
Dead Comment
But as of couple of years ago, Rails came with a number of drawbacks:
1. There was no really viable system of static typing that a significant number of people were enthusiastic about. See https://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/105sdax/whats_the_lat... for a discussion.
2. The lack of static typing meant far less IDE support. Fewer documentation tooltips, less autocompletion, etc.
3. I used to do a lot of Rails consulting. And whenever I had to drop into a codebase with more than 50,000 lines or 5 active developers, it was generally a painful slog. Too many weird Rails plugins that stopped being maintained, too much magic, too many nasty surprises while refactoring.
Basically, smaller Rails projects were an absolute delight. Larger Rails projects, though, tended to feel more like a swamp. Tools like https://activeadmin.info/ could tip the balance where applicable.
I still think that small Rails projects are fantastic, and I don't think anything since has remotely matched Rails' productivity within that niche. There's just too much mature tooling, and much of it works together seamlessly. But not too many projects want classic multi-page apps right now, and small projects often grow up to be big projects.
Your other comments are basically: - ruby/rails has a great 3P package system - oh and yes you can choose "bad" ones - ruby/rails let's you quickly write great code - oh and yes you can just as quickly write "bad" code
- A lot of IDE support. The loss of documentation tooltips, in particular, can be painful in a team environment.
- The ability to change an API and immediately see all the affected code. This affects refactoring speed when making big cleanups. Massive updates I could do in a few hours in Rust might take 2 weeks on a big Rails project.
- Team-wide clarity on exactly what goes into key data structures. Can something be null? Does it allow numbers, or only strings? Etc.
With two developers and a small code base, you can keep most of this information in your head. And Rails is still unmatched for terse, clear code, plus off-the-shelf modules for many common tasks.
I'm not even sure that Ruby could be retrofitted with a really worthwhile type system, to be honest. JavaScript already required a lot of black magic, and in some ways, Ruby is even more dynamic. So perhaps Ruby is better left as-is, even if that makes it a poorer choice for projects that would benefit from static typing.
I could guess why, but I'll let others speculate.
It's refreshing to read about someone who prefers a straightforward approach (using boring technology) rather than dividing work across multiple teams and technologies. Using a single, full-stack framework not only simplifies the development process but also enhances the overall enjoyment when working :)
There's a lot of awesome options for boring technology! Even javascript has next.js which is pretty boring at this point, even if it is missing some things.
Deleted Comment
The good part is that if you start early with a good design, it's fairly clear how to move from views to a REST API (DRF or Django-ninja) later and split the front end if you need to.
Question for people here on HN: Could a similar position to the blog post be taken in 2024, ie "Just use PHP (and LAMP)"?
I've been trying to find it for years. I've started maybe 5ish desktop apps over the last decade and each time did the dance of "QT can't possibly be it...can it?" And then googled and tried everything I could find. In my experience it's all pretty bad. Unironically the best solutions I've found are either Unity/Godot or Electron.
If you pick an OS, I think there are generally good answers. In Windows, it's .NET and C# with Visual Studio as your IDE. On OSX, it's Swift/ObjectiveC and AppKit, with XCode as your IDE. For Linux? idk, is it the year of the Linux desktop yet?
Particularly so with https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Avalonia.Markup.Declarative / https://github.com/wieslawsoltes/NXUI or https://github.com/fsprojects/Avalonia.FuncUI (F#) if you like declarative UI.
Although it got my attention that rails could work really well on production with SQLite (even more boring technology), for small sites.
Also had slight issues with concurrent writes on SQLite though potentially things like a SQLite per user would be neat especially when it comes to backup/recovery