RoR

[srachit]

I recently attended a workshop on RoR at my university. I came back pretty disappointed(I guess largely due to the fact that the workshop wasn't held properly and faced a lot of problems), I came back with a very horrible impression about RoR as an utterly complicated and useless language. What are your opinions about it and should I some time in the future ever give it a second chance and see what is all the hype around it?

[Jackolantern]

Ruby on Rails has the distinct place in history as being the framework that absolutely evolved nearly every piece of web development. It brought the MVC pattern (created at Xerox Park in the 70's) to the web, popularized ORMs, introduced the world to web scaffolding, and also reinvigorated interest in full web stacks.

However, in my opinion, the world has caught up. Pretty much every part from that previous paragraph is now available in all other web platforms. ASP.NET MVC, numerous PHP frameworks such as Laravel, Sails.js...the list of excellent MVC frameworks just goes on and on. Many critics have also said a few have far surpassed RoR, such as ASP.NET MVC, with its excellent Entity Framework ORM. Unless you are a Ruby developer (and not many people are), there is little reason to pick up RoR today.

[srachit]

Students at my university seem to have an unusual love for RoR. I had never paid much attention to RoR before coming here, but recently I have noticed that most of our engineering websites are made on RoR + bootstrap, quite a few internships want RoR developers, and we also have RoR San Diego developers meeting once a month at our university.

[Jackolantern]

Once you leave the university, you will see the world is much less enthused about it. Yes, there are jobs out there, but a tiny fraction as many as for .NET, Java and PHP.

[hallsofvallhalla]

There are two kind of developers in the world, people who throw up at the sound of ROR and people who will kick you in face for saying anything bad about it. It is a huge gap. You either hate it or a huge Fanboi. No in between. the only compianies I have seen using it are small mom and pop companies that their son is the head developer and requires it.

In the real world things like python, Ruby, Lua, ect.. are rare and if you find a job for one you will most likely be fighting another 100 developers from around the world for the position. Then you take .Net and the jobs are a dime a dozen and all paying pretty great.

[a_bertrand]

Ruby is basically a Python a bit changed.... Yet... it's really not all that used. There is no really good IDE, and the community is a bit small too. Honestly I don't see any advantages to pick RoR. C# or PHP offers a lot more in my opinion. Even if for personal preference of course I would take C# and for a very long list of reasons.

The only other alternative to it, would be Java, which has many drawbacks for very few advantages.

[Jackolantern]

I actually know Python pretty well, and Ruby is completely foreign to me. It reminds me a bit more of some of the odd languages like Ada and Lisp.

[a_bertrand]

Ok right maybe not really a python derivative... But it was somehow the impression it gave me when I tried it. Anyhow, the test I did was really painful, and I really don't see any benefit from this language. Yet if somebody want to use it, then fine for me, but don't expect me to understand you

[Jackolantern]

Ruby was JAL ("Just Another Language") until Rails was randomly built on it. Ruby probably had about as many users as Ada or Lisp until that point. If the authors of Rails had been PHP users, it would have been made on PHP. There really is nothing special to Ruby from what I have seen. It has a load of syntactic sugar, just like Python does, but Python seems to make a lot more sense when compared to the other popular languages out there.

[Crawling Chaos]

I am going to be looking at the language soon on Codecademy one I am done with my basic stuff I am just starting. Seems interesting and from what I've heard it's Server-Side similar to PHP so perhaps I could make something with it!