
Ruby on Rails is out: major coding bootcamp ditches it, due to waning interest - doener
https://thenextweb.com/dd/2017/07/26/ruby-rails-major-coding-bootcamp-ditches-due-waning-interest/
======
danmaz74
IMHO, the main reason Rails is declining in relevance isn't microservices or
the productivity (!) of Java, but the fact that more and more development
effort for web applications is moving into JS front-end coding.

I still love Rails, but when your front end is mostly done using React (or
something similar) you lose many of the advantages you previously had when
almost your full stack was inside Ruby and Rails.

The latest version moved in the right direction by making Webpack a first-
class citizen, but what would really make a big difference would be some kind
of native integration of a mature front-end framework. My personal choice
would be React, but anything would do as long as the connection between the
Ruby API part and the Javascript front-end part followed the DRY and
"convention over configuration" principles that made Rails great in the first
place.

If I could scaffold CRUD interfaces with basic React components already
integrated with the Rails API, and then start developing from there, I would
become a much happier programmer :)

~~~
skewart
> IMHO, the main reason Rails is declining in relevance isn't microservices or
> the productivity (!) of Java, but the fact that more and more development
> effort for web applications is moving into JS front-end coding.

This. I also suspect that for developers whose first language - or primary
language these days - is JavaScript it's a lot more comfortable to reach for a
Node backend framework when they need it. Also, Go has become pretty popular
for somewhat more custom or complex backend tasks. Plus, there are more and
more high-level third-party services offering different pieces of backend
functionality.

~~~
billdybas
I would consider JavaScript my primary language, and you're right - Node is
usually my go-to choice for a web backend. Express is pretty easy to grasp and
be productive with.

But when I need more (auth, orm, logging, etc.), I feel like I'm spending more
time searching for and curating packages and then trying to get them
integrated than I am actually building an application.

Rails (especially its API flag) has caught my attention recently because this
becomes a non-issue - you pretty much just use what Rails has included.

~~~
cozuya
Huh I have had a very easy time integrating passport, mongoose, and morgan
respectively for the above 3 asks.

~~~
asdf1234
I'd normally also have to select packages for sending emails, running
background jobs, internationalization, templates, validation, file uploads and
caching at a bare minimum. Then I'd have to make sure they all work well
together, setup testing and probably have to write additional functionality
that Rails or Django already covers.

Frameworks like Rails and Django cover a ton of functionality and gluing
together and maintaining a set of packages to cover even a fraction of that
functionality is a ton of work that's often for very little gain.

~~~
rbrcurtis
Check out hapi. [https://hapijs.com](https://hapijs.com)

------
JohnBooty
As a developer who currently works with Rails, there's a deeply cynical part
of me that says, "Good for Rails, then! I guess the trendy ones are leaving
because Ruby and Rails have finally achieved some level of sanity."

Ruby itself seems to have settled into a groove. I don't see it ever getting
too much faster, which is fine with me. I mean obviously I want _moar speed_
but as a glue language, I think it's fast enough for what it is. GC has been
pretty nice since 2.2 or so; we basically don't worry about it in our big
monolith app at this point.

Rails is... kind of wacky, still, but again, decently mature... mature-ish.
Mature enough. At least compared to the insane Lovecraftian existential dread-
inducing abyss that is the Javascript ecosystem.

(I realize the article's about Java, not JS, but let's face it. JS is
siphoning people away from RoR, not Java. Java devs have always been in
demand; that's just something boot camps have ignored because it's _popular_
but not _trendy_ )

~~~
meesterdude
> I don't see it ever getting too much faster

ruby 3 will be 3 times faster [http://engineering.appfolio.com/appfolio-
engineering/2015/11...](http://engineering.appfolio.com/appfolio-
engineering/2015/11/18/ruby-3x3)

> Rails is... kind of wacky, still,

in what manner? it is one of the most well well crafted and thoughtful pieces
of software i've ever used. It has never been "wacky" for me, behaved
unexpectedly, or require convoluted effort.

~~~
JohnBooty

        > ruby 3 will be 3 times faster
    

The goal is "three times faster than Ruby 2.0" though, which means we're
already part of the way there.

I'm not entirely sure the 3x speedup is possible; it was just kind of a vague
goal from Matz meant to be a rallying cry.

You can get a taste of the future today with bootsnap (not to be confused with
Bootstrap) which enables roughly 2x faster app startup thanks to compiled
bytecode caching.

The other major speedup on the horizon is probably the effort to make all
objects invariant by default. You can get a taste of that today with frozen
string literals, though the impact is not huge, which is why the "3x faster"
thing seems like a stretch to me. (It's possible that more impactful
optimizations are possible if/when this invariance-by-default becomes a core
language feature)

I'm no low-level Ruby VM hacker though so my opinions are not especially well-
informed. I hope I'm wrong and we soar right past 3x and get a 10x speedup
eventually. =)

    
    
        > in what manner? it is one of the most well well crafted and thoughtful pieces of software i've ever used.
    

I like Rails! The main wacky thing to me is the way in which it modifies so
many core Ruby classes. I understand the the ability to so is a part of the
core Ruby and/or Rails magic, but I actually _don 't_ necessarily like my
framework to blend so seamlessly with my language.

Most non-trivial Rails apps need to veer off the rails at some point due to
user/business needs, and that's when dealing with Rails (and the tendrils it
has wrapped around so much of Ruby) gets tough.

~~~
meesterdude
Yeah, we'll have to see about ruby 3. I know they're at least making
deliberate effort - and are pondering some static typing. I've never been
truly bitten by ruby performance, or ever found it so. But Crystal seems like
an interesting language if/when that becomes a larger issue.

> The main wacky thing to me is the way in which it modifies so many core Ruby
> classes.

Ok, fair enough. I actually wish they were part of ruby, more often than not.
But I do appreciate them, and use them often. I don't have a puritan objection
to their presence, though. I view it as making the world a little nicer.

> Most non-trivial Rails apps need to veer off the rails at some point due to
> user/business needs, and that's when dealing with Rails (and the tendrils it
> has wrapped around so much of Ruby) gets tough.

I must disagree with you about jumping off rails. There are numerous, complex
large scale applications out there, running on rails. Github, hulu, shopify,
basecamp, to name a few. I've worked on complex rails applications and they've
performed really well, overall. On top of that, they were approachable and
maintainable, even for junior devs.

Most businesses are in fact fine starting on rails, and staying on rails. When
i say most, I mean 95%. Short of becoming a twitter or reaching similar huge
scale, rails will carry you very, very, very far.

~~~
JohnBooty

        I've never been truly bitten by ruby performance, or ever found it so
    

I've never by bitten by Ruby's runtime performance. It's "fast enough" and for
common use cases that need more performance, there's usually a C extension
(nokogiri, etc) on tap.

Mostly, performance is an issue with large apps and their rspec run times and
app startup times. (And of course, those are not purely -- or necessarily even
_primarily_ \-- Ruby's fault, but still)

    
    
        There are numerous, complex large scale applications out there, running on rails.
    

Rails is definitely pretty hackable to fit one's own needs, but that's where
the "convention over explicit configuration" stuff becomes a hindrance rather
than a help.

Don't get me wrong, it's not awful, it's pretty good.

    
    
        Most businesses are in fact fine starting on rails, 
        and staying on rails. When i say most, I mean 95%.
    

I agree! Like I said in my initial post I generally like where Ruby and Rails
are at.

Our big old Rails monolith (started on Rails 2, currently on 4.2, and
hopefully on 5.x in a few months) has carried us to about $500mil projected
revenue this year. Could other stacks have done the job better? Quite
possibly, but they quite possibly might have been much worse as well. =)

~~~
meesterdude
> Mostly, performance is an issue with large apps and their rspec run times

I hear you! I hate long test suit runtimes, and they are easily grown. I made
a gem to address this, by running your test suite across a cluster of cloud
VM's and reduce test times from 30 minutes to 30 seconds.
[http://github.com/meesterdude/cloudspeq](http://github.com/meesterdude/cloudspeq)

> but that's where the "convention over explicit configuration" stuff becomes
> a hindrance rather than a help

I feel It just gets you going - you have a foundation you can run with - and
one that other devs will know "out of the box", which means onboard is
easier/faster. But it's never meant it's not configurable. You'll still need
to cache, to adjust web servers and background jobs and all of course. But
rails makes it possible, easy (and fun!) for one person to do all that.

> Our big old Rails monolith (started on Rails 2, currently on 4.2, and
> hopefully on 5.x in a few months) has carried us to about $500mil projected
> revenue this year.

Dayum! Well done! Do you know how many requests a second you serve and the
avg. response time?

> Could other stacks have done the job better?

I think so long as you haven't been severely bitten by scaling or performance
issues; the product itself is what matters so long as the technology can
deliver on it. Clearly you're doing pretty well regardless! Proof is in the
pudding.

------
holydude
This is a huge bullshit article. RoR is not out it just is not sexy anymore
and there are way more Java jobs than Ruby jobs. Bootcamps are businesses like
any others and they only care about making money. Of course they ditch
Ruby/RoR if their customers want to learn the tech that is in demand. If you
compare the raw numbers the only stacks worth learning are Java,C# and
JavaScript.

~~~
aaron-lebo
_RoR is not out it just is not sexy anymore_

 _Of course they ditch Ruby /RoR if their customers want to learn the tech
that is in demand._

You seem to be agreeing with the article but disagreeing over phrasing?

Ruby and Rails aren't special anymore, there's lots of other languages which
can do the same thing but have huge advantages. Then again, that was the case
going back to 2007 (Pylons is but one example - the Rails template on a better
VM and with more libraries available and none of the bloat and magic). Rails
has always been about hype and that hype doesn't matter when other stacks have
10x the performance and are just as productive.

Brb, gonna go kill some zombie fcgi processes.

~~~
holydude
RoR is special that it does one thing exceptionally well. And that is
monolithic web applications. I do not know how you measure productivity no
other stack comes close to RoR.

~~~
always_good
On the other hand, I'd say RoR optimizes productivity for Day 1 at the expense
of Day 60+. I abandoned RoR because I didn't like that deal.

------
nickjj
A few days ago a code school raised $85,000 USD on Kickstarter[0] to build a
Rails application.

Rails is really stable and has a battle hardened community around it. That's a
good combo for teaching, learning and practical usage.

When it comes to teaching / learning / real world usage, the last thing you
want to deal with is 18 new versions of 5 different tools every month.

[0]: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/leotrieu/build-your-
own...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/leotrieu/build-your-own-airbnb-
with-ruby-on-rails-and-react)

~~~
hashkb
Additionally, it's still a great choice to back any fancy modern front end
tool. API mode and/or Webpacker.

I'd love for bootcamps to stop teaching Rails so the rest of us can start
raising the bar again.

~~~
meesterdude
> I'd love for bootcamps to stop teaching Rails so the rest of us can start
> raising the bar again.

this is my takeaway as well. It's still lightyears ahead of anything else out
there, and the bang for the buck is hard to match.

------
danpalmer
They are moving to Java+Spring. Is this not just a move from training Rails
devs for startups towards training Java devs for big companies? I don't think
this is about waning interest in Rails at all, I think it's a move to
reposition the bootcamp in a bigger skills market.

~~~
iagooar
I have been working for more than 6 years with Ruby on Rails, and I can
definitely tell you, there is waning interest.

Many of the core team members of Rails have long moved on to other
technologies.

Companies don't see Rails as something that will give them an edge anymore.
Yes, it is quick to develop a prototype in, yet the ongoing performance
optimizing burden and the mess it becomes at large scale are not worth it
anymore.

Competition has been catching up, and many modern frameworks have taken the
best out of Rails, while ditching the not-so-good parts.

The job market for Rails devs seems to be pretty dry. Many Rails devs I know,
including myself, do not get even 10% of Rails job offers anymore, as it used
to be until a couple of years ago.

Ruby, as a language, is completely stuck and stale, and has been for a long
time now. There is no real innovation, the single-threadedness and the GIL are
just not good enough in 2017. Ruby 3 has been announced for 2020, and if you
ask me, what is promised in terms of features is rather too little, too late.

Rails, as a framework, has been steadily releasing improvements and new
features, yet those are either not that relevant, or poorly implemented (e.g
ActionCable). The framework's creator, DHH, has been very opinionated about
the strength of Rails monolithic approach. To me, this is not where the
industry is heading (like it or not) and Rails is going to have a tough time
keeping up with the latest software architecture trends like microservices
(again, like it or not, microservices are here and they solve real problems).

Rails will be there for a long, long time, no doubt about it. But for many of
us, it's just not that sharp knife it used to be anymore. Better accept it
sooner than later.

~~~
criddell
I'm halfway through Michael Hartl's RoR tutorial (IMHO, it's very good) and so
your comment is a little disheartening. What are the top one or two
technologies (aside from just Javascript) that you would learn today?

~~~
iagooar
Finish that tutorial, understanding Rails will help you undertand better other
frameworks that were inspired by Rails.

Or, if you ask me, learn Elixir + Phoenix. I'm betting part of my future
career and my company on it, because I believe that it's the future. But Go,
Clojure or Scala are great choices for web development as well these days.

~~~
cutler
Elixir is hardly visible in the jobs market. At least if Indeed.com is to be
believed. It's too niche. Clojure is at least as good as Elixir, if not
better, and has failed to gain widespread adoption after 8 years since 1.0 so
I don't see Elixir going anywhere. There's just too much competition.

~~~
criddell
Can you recommend one or two language + framework combinations that might be a
better choice than RoR?

~~~
cutler
Elixir/Phoenix, Clojure/Luminus, ClojureScript/Macchiato and Scala/Play are
arguably better than Rails if you really grok FP but they don't have the
community, maturity and adoption that Rails has enjoyed for a long time. If
you're ok with OO monoliths Rails is hard to beat.

------
tboyd47
It's the end of an era. From 2005 to 2007, the "Web 2.0" craze, the release of
Ruby on Rails, and the rise of Agile methods all happened at once. These ideas
all fed into and supported each other, resulting in a cohesive movement with a
lot of momentum. The long-term fact turned out to be that this movement didn't
benefit large corporations that have always been and usually still are the
main source of employment for software developers. So we have returned to our
pre-Rails, pre-agile world of high specialization and high bureaucratic
control, even if Rails and "Agile" still exist with some popularity.

The Web 2.0 concept, which was mainly just marketer-speak for using a lot of
AJAX, survived and continued. Agile survived but was transformed into its own
opposite. Rails continues, but it has lost its ability to draw newcomers,
which was its source of vitality. This is not because the technology has
changed, but because the world around it has changed.

~~~
rhizome31
The Web 2.0 concept was more about the read/write web and user-generated
content than it was about Ajax.

~~~
bighi
That's not how it felt at the time.

In a lot of places, learning Ajax was synonym to learning Web 2.0.

------
oelmekki
Using new SO questions as a metric for popularity is kind of weird. I mean, if
people keep asking questions and getting answers, at some point people looking
for something already have an answer, right? Even when accounting for
duplicates, you can expect the amount of new questions to lower with time.

I guess a better metric would be the amount of upvotes over time for questions
and answers about a topic.

~~~
matt_s
I've made this point a few times here on HN. StackOverflow QA& isn't really a
good indicator of anything industry wide.

Most experienced developers who know their language just use API docs if
needed to get things done. Sure there might be some obscure edge scenario you
need to ask a question about once in a while.

Beginners ask lots of questions also new languages/frameworks will generate
interest and questions. That doesn't mean those are the things that are most
used or most in demand in the industry.

Also SO primarly contains questions on open source based web programming. This
discounts entire sectors of the industry using proprietary tech.

SO likes to publish their metrics since it brings more attention to them, its
marketing, they are a business.

A good way to track things would be if job postings (not just SO careers)
could somehow be marked as filled. Then you could ascertain from the
description what tech stack is used.

------
bshimmin
_" There’s plenty of really great web development alternatives," Shaw said,
mentioning React, Vue.js_

How on earth are those alternatives for Rails?

~~~
bryanrasmussen
The sentence starts with a direct quote, but ends with a sparse summation. The
connection between these two may have been vague or even nonexistent except in
the writer's mind.

------
ralmidani
I learned Rails via Code School and Michael Hartl's excellent tutorial, and
almost began building real apps with it before settling on Django + REST
Framework + Ember. 2 years later, I'm now learning React.

With ES6/ES7/ES8 becoming reality, I would welcome a move toward a
JS/CoffeeScript framework that allows sharing of code between client and
server.

But of all the options I have seen, nothing offers the simplicity of elegance
of Django's Models and REST Framework's ModelSerializers.

It's really a shame there is no "perfect" isomorphic alternative to Django and
Rails, because so much time is wasted doing the research and making the tweaks
necessary to get the client and server to talk to each other properly. Not to
mention having to learn the intricacies (and idiosyncrasies) of two languages
and avoid mistaking one's idioms for the other's.

One of my long-term goals is to learn enough JS/CoffeeScript to be able to
port parts of Django and REST Framework to Node.js and the client, along with
enhancements that make pub/sub easy, and glue that enables effortless
connection to a view library like React.

I realize there are existing solutions that almost achieve what I want, but
none is ideal (Backbone doesn't support ES6 classes and doesn't do isomorphic
out of the box, Meteor prefers MongoDB over an RDBMS, etc.)

~~~
rockostrich
TypeScript is probably your best bet. Static typing the same classes on the
front and backend is going to make any REST API easier to develop. Another
alternative is using something like protobuf [1] to define your data models.

[1] [https://github.com/google/protobuf](https://github.com/google/protobuf)

~~~
ralmidani
I'm interested in TS, but I've been working with CoffeeScript (and Python) for
2 years and am very fond of significant whitespace (and not at all fond of
semicolons and curly braces). There was a Typed CoffeeScript project, but
nothing is active now. And CoffeeScript 2, with built-in support for JSX, is
in beta.

------
dbattaglia
Rails is a kitchen-sink of tools for building full stack server rendered
monolithic web applications. Even the built in support for webpack/React
("webpacker") feels very "rails-ey" compared to just using node. It's still a
great framework but it doesn't seem too shocking that bootcamps, trying to
teach the new web-dev hotness to students as fast as possible, would drop it.
I just wish the article wasn't so dramatic.

~~~
skewart
They're replacing it with Java/Spring. That's hardly the new web-dev hotness.
I suspect this change is less a reflection on Rails and more an indicator that
there is a business opportunity to teach new programmers Java, because there
are tons of legacy Java apps out in the wild, and the resources for learning
Java these days are terrible compared to learning, say, JavaScript.

------
thebiglebrewski
"Is the end of Ruby on Rails nigh? Everything seems to point that way."

As soon as I read that, I just stopped. I know the point of this article is to
get a big reaction out of the dev community. I'm quite happy with my Rails
back-end and React front-end, thank you! Stable, tons of community support,
quite fast for my needs.

Only Siths deal in absolutes?

------
1ba9115454
There's still nothing to beat RoR in terms of productivity and lines of code.

I'm happy to switch to another full stack framework if I can see a clear
benefit but as yet nothing comes close.

~~~
meaydinli
Check out Elixir/Phoenix Framework. It is supposed to be by ex-RoR people.

~~~
meesterdude
Elixir/Phoenix is not what I would consider a step forward, or something to
jump over to. While perhaps technically you can put more load on it - you
sacrifice a lot of syntax, approachability and general developer happiness
that you get with Rails. Tradeoffs I am not willing to make given the rails
stack is more than fast enough.

~~~
cutler
Elixir hasn't really made its presence felt in the job market yet so it's too
early to bet on.

------
alanfranzoni
Spring Boot is simply exceptional; it makes web application development fast,
as it's said to be with Django and Rails, but retains a lot functionality from
the Spring environment. I can't recommend it enough - things like Django and
Rails just feel "old" after using Spring boot - even tough a good part of
Spring power comes from the language and the tooling - some features (like
automatic json-to-object conversion with correct typing, or object-to-object
mapping) are just very hard to implement in a dynamically typed language.

~~~
ddorian43
Doesn't look very fast on benchmarks:
[https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r14&hw=...](https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r14&hw=ph&test=plaintext)
.

~~~
alanfranzoni
I don't understand the benchmark completely (there seem to be some web server
or "network programming framework" mingled with web frameworks? wut?), by the
way I'm sure that pure speed is not Spring best virtue, and it's not Java's
either, unless you take care at pre-warming the JIT and you've got enough RAM
(and I suppose that, even then, Spring would be slower than other, 'shallower'
frameworks).

Spring makes it easy and fast to develop web applications, AND evolve them in
time. A lot of things are ready out of the box, but you can easily customize
many, many parts of your application when and if you actually need it,
substituting what the framework would do for what YOU actually need. I haven't
found anything like that, yet, in other web frameworks (admittedly: there's
tons out there, so I probably tried 1% of them).

~~~
kod
> I'm sure that pure speed is not Spring best virtue, and it's not Java's
> either

Go look at those benchmarks again. Over half of the top 10 are JVM servers.

~~~
alanfranzoni
Yes... SERVERS... not frameworks. Usually Java-based frameworks are a bit more
complex than Python/Ruby/Javascript based ones.

~~~
kod
Plain old java servlets are the #1 result on the json benchmark, at over half
a million requests per second. The implementation is less than 40 lines, most
of which is imports / comments / curly braces.

I have no idea what point you're trying to make with regards to complexity or
some kind of server vs framework distinction.

------
swaincreates
My master plan is coming to fruition. Become Rails dev, Rails goes out of
fashion, market myself as Rails expert, profit. Ah who am I kidding, I dont
have the energy to market myself as anything.

------
athenot
I'm no fan of Ruby on Rails _BUT_ measuring it by its popularity within coding
bootcamps is not exactly the best metric. While they do provide hype around a
technology, RoR is sufficiently established (and has been before coding
bootcamps were around) that it doesn't need to be popular within those circles
in order to thrive.

If anything, what's popular among coding bootcamps is more indicative of the
kind of junior positions which are more readily available.

------
vajrapani666
Having been a rails engineer for 12+ years, I can say I haven't used rails for
front end work in about 5 years. In 2011 I started migrating front ends from
erb to ERB heavily enhanced with angular, my frontends relied more and more on
an API and slowly, the "@" instance variable assigment started to disappear
from my controllers.

I'd say many shops have had a similar experience, and full stack development
no longer depends on rails for frontend. Which means that the only rails jobs
out there, are likely backend/API/distributed systems.

There was a time when I thought rails was out the door and node.js was in, and
I converted several large rails codebases over to node.js/express. Looking
back, I don't think the node.js community was strong enough, and even today I
still miss Ruby's debugging ecosystem.

I once sat down to write a medium post a few years back on why rails is still
the best choice for backends. I would cite the number of packages for sidekiq,
the diversity of email handling libraries, and the multitude of packages to
handle just about everything. I compared it to rust, and go. The only problem
was, any time I tried to say "rails has this, X doesn't" Go had X.

Rails will stick around, but I'd recommend smart engineers diversify. Study
modern node.js codebases (things have gotten much more manageable with
await/async). Study Go. Also, check out actioncable, and start a new rails
project with "rails new --webpack=react" and build something. Seems the rails
team has embraced the modern world, which may make it one of the best cohesive
ecosystems right now.

------
tedmiston
> Replacing it is a Java course, which will emphasize the Spring application
> development framework.

This says much more about the fact that coding bootcamp grads tend to go into
bigger companies more than abything about Rails itself.

------
xacaxulu
I wonder if every bootcamp flooding the market with Rails devs and
subsequently putting huge downward pressure on wages had anything to do with
waning interest. I saw this happening years ago and moved quickly in more
niche technologies.

------
nitrogen
What drives the popularity of a framework has very little to do with merit.
RoR is still the right choice for lots of apps, and makes millions of dollars
for lots of companies, no trendy frontend framework required.

JS-heavy frontends and JVM microservices can end up being antipatterns from a
user perspective. Increased engineering costs and decreased battety life are
not strong selling points. When implemented poorly, SPAs and microservices are
scarcely better than make-work for developers.

Most of the time, you should just use Rails and be done with it.

------
cdevs
I read indeed.com job openings regularly to see what's still in demand and I
feel like I've seen a big drop over the years of jobs looking for rails
developers but I'm sure github and these job sites have more official stats.
Java and JavaScript languages have been jumping in native development a lot
more and I think that's a large part of it.

------
tomphoolery
I'm pretty sure the Spring framework is not where "developer interest" is
going these days.

------
danzig13
Sentimentally, too bad. Spitefully, good.

I learned of the framework early-ish and following it introduced me to good
concepts that I would not have pursued - my undergrad program was ASP.NET
forms based.

However, as much as I enjoyed developing with the framework I only got my foot
in the door somewhere I got paid for it once. Honestly, that is my favorite
project I've done to date
([https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/maps](https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/maps) \-
mapping portion only).

So I wish I would've gotten to do more with it, but screw all those Rails
shops that would not hire me - and have probably moved on 3 times framework-
wise since then anyways. :)

------
pcarolan
This article uses questions on stack overflow as its killer data point. Stack
overflow definitionally has fewer questions over time for any technology. If
anything this is signaling maturity and stability.

------
crb002
Django instead of Rails or Yesod on the latest project. Second iteration will
be DjangoREST/VueJS. Third iteration breaking the monolith into smaller
services.

I ported Ruby 1.8 to the IBM Blue Gene/L. Nothing out of a dislike for Ruby,
it is just that Python libraries far surpass what is available in Ruby land.

Maybe I have low standards, but the benchmark for me is how long to write an
app that populates a SELECT form field based on a domain table.

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rubyfan
Dupe
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14860834](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14860834)

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porter
Sounds like they are changing their target companies to send their students to
from startups to existing incumbents. I'm sure all those old 1990's software
companies would love to recruit junior programmers but otherwise find it
difficult. And it's probably not a bad way for non-programmers to get a decent
first programming job.

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slaymaker1907
I think the next step for web development will be a smooth blending of the
server and front end which all these node stacks hint at. For instance,
defining an endpoint defined both the code for running the endpoint as well as
the front end code for consuming it.

By defining both together, you reduce the amount of break points I'm your code
dramatically.

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znpy
«Replacing it is a Java course, which will emphasize the Spring application
development framework.»

So... It seems that Java is resurrecting.

~~~
lessnonymous
Which will also be a factor of big companies being more willing (or able) to
hire junior developers whose entire experience in the language is a boot camp

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cutler
Indeed.com (API) by job title/USA shows 611 Rails jobs, 835 Node.js, 353
Django, 243 Laravel, 117 Symfony and 9 Elixir. For the UK (Indeed.co.uk) it's
239 Rails jobs, 758 Node.js, 234 Django, 441 Laravel, 359 Symfony and 11
Elixir. By what measure is demand for Rails declining? Elixir isn't even
close.

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kumarvvr
I am just beginning to learn Django. Would you advise against it??

Even in a JS heavy front-end world, Django seems to be a good candidate to
create REST services or JSON Web API's.

And for certain kinds of sites, a combination of a static site with parts of
it automated with DRF seem to be a very good fit.

~~~
pavelludiq
Both Django and Rails will be around for many years being useful and making
businesses a lot of money. Not to mention I've seen quite a few legacy code
bases that would be pretty expensive to replace so there will be maintenance
work for a long time as well. They'll never be "the new hotness" again, but
that's a bad sign anyway IMO.

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mruniverse
Surprised they didn't replace it with Node instead.

~~~
davidbwire
They already have a MEAN stack course.

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forgottenacc57
Ruby On Rails is the Elizabeth Taylor of software development.

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pawelkomarnicki
Good, we don't need more wannabes :-)

~~~
Dude2018
They are creating future work for specialists though... Even AI won't figure
out a legacy RoR project.

