[wheels]

Am I really going to have to get out the premature optimization quote?

Most businesses fail. Those that don't fail, usually don't have interesting scaling issues. (You can go a really long way on a boring monolith stack.)

So in most cases, whatever gets things out into the world and able to see if the business can be validated makes sense, and then you optimize later. A nonscalable stack that you can iterate on 50% faster is more likely to produce a viable company than a more scalable stack that's slower to work with.

If you're a hired employee, it's easy to forget that the place you're working for is already a big exception just by the virtue of it grew large enough to hire you.

[berkes]

This hints at a false dichotomy. One that especially Ruby and Rails keep afloat.

Productivity and Scalability(in performance sense) aren't opposites.

Take Bash. Performs bad and is a guarantee for terrible productivity in a large category of software. But perfect for a niche. Take Java. Performs better than many, and allows for good productivity (if you avoid the enterprise architectures, but that goes for any language). Or take Rust. Productivity much higher than most C/C++ and in my case higher than with Ruby/Rails, and also much more performant.

[wheels]

It's a false dichotomy in theory. It's mostly not in practice. And that was far truer in 2006 when Shopify got started. Then there really weren't any modern web frameworks in performant languages.

Primarily it's not the language that makes people more or less productive, though it does have some influence. It's mostly the frameworks in those languages. And traditionally the most modern / full-featured web frameworks haven't been in systems languages. The major counterexample at the moment (while still obviously not a systems language) is that modern JS VMs are actually really fast, so while I don't love JS, it does hit that sweet spot at the moment of performance and mature frameworks.

Also, I've never worked in Rust, but am mostly a systems programmer, and while I understand that Rust is supposed to be easier than C or C++, I'm skeptical that it's as easy to work with as higher level languages, or that you could throw most web developers into Rust without some serious additional learning.

[berkes]

> serious learning.

That's another problem I have in this narrative. Productivity isn't measured by throwing an inexperienced developer at something and then looking how fast they get stuff done. That's learnability.

I'm an experienced Rails developer (some 15 years in) and my productivity has plataued for years now. I've been doing Java and Rust work for years too now. Web and application dev. It took years, but my productivity in both Java and Rust, on anything that lives longer than 6months, has vastly surpassed that of my Rails.

Productivity of a senior, or experienced dev, of a (large) team, of a team with high turnover, of a project over decades, all that is productivity too. And in all those categories, Rails isn't great.

[wheels]

We're talking past each other because we're arguing different things. If I understand you, you're saying that you can avoid technical debt by using tools that are intrinsically more performant, and that skilled developers are more productive with more advanced tooling.

That's all correct.

But the point I'm making is that if an MVP isn't accruing technical debt, it's over-engineered. Most of them will be thrown away, or rescoped, and so taking on technical debt is an advantageous strategy: you only have to pay the technical debt on the few survivors.

Shopify at its offset was a CRUD app (fun fact: it started as a snowboarding shop), and in 2006, Rails was a great choice for that.

Your notions are fine for an established company building a piece of infrastructure they're certain they'll need. But that's not what Shopify was, and it's not the spot most startups picking a framework are at.

Your thing about developer quality is kind of meh. Building the first versions of a shopping platform isn't rocket surgery. You don't need Anthony Bourdain to make a sandwich. Particularly if you're not sure anybody wants a sandwich.

[berkes]

I agree entirely about that tech debt. I've built, sold, grew and failed several startups myself. Many with Rails at the center. I've been building with Rails for way over a decade, so I'm well aware of the "options" back in the day.

What I'm arguing, however, isn't to take on debt¹, I'm saying that productivity and performance aren't always opposites.

Sure, Rails trades in performance for productivity. But, I've learned, this is mostly just Rails. There are many languages and frameworks that are just as productive (for a certain definition, see previous comment) as Rails, but also performant. And I'm arguing that performance affects productivity: a performant, scalable software is easier to work on, because it gives faster feedback (tests, ci, manual testing), wastes less time waiting for stuff (hundreds of single seconds add up over days and weeks weeks), and decreases friction (I'll postpone running the full test suite if I know it'll hog my machine for the next half hour. I'll gladly run it, if it takes a few minutes or less).

Edit: and, if what you say about tech debt is true (I think it is), wouldn't Shopify be at a position now to pay it back? Many startups that used Rails paid it back by migrating elsewhere. So maybe Rails in its entirety is Tech Debt?

¹A cautionary sidenote, that I've learned the hard way, is that taking on tech debt is an art in itself. Not all debt is alike. Many kinds will cripple my project. Where at the unlikely moment that I do need to scale, that's impossible. Or when I do need to pivot for the umpteenth time, we cannot, without that Giant Refactoring.

[fiedzia]

> Productivity and Scalability(in performance sense) aren't opposites.

They often clash with each other. Rust for example is a lot less pleasant to debug than interpreted languages and that is a loss of productivity.

[berkes]

Not in my case. Rust, for me, is much better for productivity than my other major languages Ruby and JavaScript. The main reason is type enforcement, which is why -for me- typescript is much more productive than JavaScript. A large category of bugs simply won't exist (are caught at compiletime). With Ruby, I'd have to write hundreds of edge-case unit-tests just to cover stuff that, with Rust is enforced compile-time for me.

The other reason is runtime speed. A typical Ruby test-suite takes me minutes to run. A typical Rails test suite tens of minutes. A typical Rust test-suite takes < a minute to compile and seconds to run. I run my tests hundreds of times per day. With a typical Rails project, I'm waiting for tests upwards of an hour per day (yes, I know guard, fancy runners with pattern matching etc).

The last reason, for me, is editor/IDE integration: Rust (and TS) type system make discovery, autocomplete and even co-pilot so much more useful that my productivity tanks the moment I'm "forced" to use my IDE with only solargraph to help.

And debugging: sure! I've had reasonable success with gdb and ruby debuggers in the past. Rust's gdb isn't much better. But stepping through a stack in a rails project is a nightmare: the stack is often so ridiculous deep (but it does show how elegant and neat it's all composed!) that it's all noise and no signal. Leaving a binding.pry or even `throw "why don't we get here?!"` also works, but to call that "productive" debugging is a stretch, IMO.

[JohnBooty]

I like strong typing as well, and worked with a strongly typed language for years before Ruby.

Then I did Ruby+Rails fulltime for 9 years. Just recently moved on.

    With Ruby, I'd have to write hundreds of 
    edge-case unit-tests just to cover stuff that, 
    with Rust is enforced compile-time for me.

Never a problem for me.

It was one of my major concerns about Ruby, prior to starting out. But like... it just wasn't a problem.

It turns out that we just don't pass the wrong kind of thing to the other thing very often, or at least I and my teams did not. It certainly helps if you follow some sane programming practices. Using well-named keyword arguments and identifiers, for example.

    # bad. wtf is input?
    def grant_admin_privileges(input)        
    end

    # you would have to be a psychopath to pass this
    # anything but a User object
    def grant_admin_privileges(user:)
    end
   

Of course, this can be a major problem if you're dealing with unfamiliar or poorly written code. In which case, yeah, that sucks. I know that many will scoff at the old-timey practice of "use good names" in lieu of actual language-level typing enforcement, and that "just use a little discipline!" has long been the excuse of people defending bad languages and tools. But a little discipline in Ruby goes such a long way, moreso than in any language I have ever used.

    With Ruby, I'd have to write hundreds of edge-case unit-tests 
    just to cover stuff that, with Rust is enforced compile-time for me.

Well, you do need test coverage with Ruby. But you do anyway in any language for "real" work, soooooo.

I strongly dispute that you need extra tests for "edge cases" because of dynamic typing. Something is deeply wrong if we are coding defensive methods that handle lots of different types of inputs and do lots of duck typing checks or etc. to defend themselves against type-related edge cases.

     (yes, I know guard, fancy runners with pattern matching etc).

Yeaaaaaah. Rails tests hit the database by default, which is good and bad, but it is inarguably slowwww. I don't find pure Ruby code to be slow to test.

     The last reason, for me, is editor/IDE integration

Yes. I still miss feeling like some kind of god-level being with C#, Visual Studio, and Resharper. I liked the Ruby REPL which offset that largely in terms of coding productivity but was certainly not a direct replacement.

    But stepping through a stack in a rails project is a nightmare

Yeah. I always wanted a version of the pry 'next' method that was basically like, "step to the next line of code but skip all framework and Ruby core code"

[berkes]

I dare you to have a look at your rollbar, sentry or other exception logging of a rails project. And I'll put money on it, that the top 5 exceptions has several 'undefined method x' (probably on nil) errors.

Those warrant unit tests. Those will regress. Those would never exist in a strongly typed language (though Java still has null...ugh)

[JohnBooty]

Yeah that's the usual argument and I don't agree.

It's true that 99.9% of production log errors are NoMethodError exceptions.

annnnnd 99.9% of those NoMethodErrors are just code not handling nils/nulls correctly

annnnnd 99.9% of those unhandled runtime nils/nulls are from external data (user inputs, database data, etc)

So strong typing doesn't help you there at runtime, it just blows up differently.

[fiedzia]

> # you would have to be a psychopath to pass this > # anything but a User object > def grant_admin_privileges(user:)

I had an app once where we used user objects, and later switched to ids to save db calls. Now you have some functions that can accept both, and some that accept one of them, and without type hints (that was long time ago) you can easily make a mistake.

[JohnBooty]

That sounds like some malpractice.

Ruby has had keyword arguments since Ruby 2.0 from 2008 and earlier code could certainly use option hashes.

So I don't see a reason for any confusion there.

    # probably malpractice in a system where many methods
    # take IDs and some take Users
    def do_something_with_user(user)
    end

    # how hard is this? trivially easy and unambiguous.
    def do_something_with_user(user_id:)
    end

In the second example, you would really have to be asleep at the wheel to make a mistake like:

    # this is obviously wrong
    do_something_with_user(user_id: User.first)

I don't see the problem. It would be nice if a compiler/IDE could catch that, but on the other hand, it just looks blatantly wrong as you type it and will certainly blow up the first time you call it.