[rubymancer]

> I look at a "sort of" competitor in our industry, and their rate of feature development is ridiculously slow by comparison.

Seconded. At my org, Ruby/Rails is our competitive advantage.

Our 5-6 competitors are all Java/.NET shops -- we deliver fixes and new features dramatically faster and deploy them with ease. It gets noticed.

The main downside is rails doesn't scale well re: complexity so regular refactors are necessary (ours is a high-volume big data app).

For performance/cost, it took some doing but by strategically moving business logic to higher performance techs we've even managed to get to a great spot there.

[RowanH]

While certainly a little polarising the adage of optimise later really comes into play here. We do a lightweight industry specific system that had all the generic stuff (eg time/tasks etc) with some special sauce that makes us stand out. One of our clients said "Mate the rate you guys are adding features - the ERP company we went with they haven't done 1/10th of what you've done in the last year. Can you implement full multi-level bills of materials? "

I said "no, can't do that - that's huge".

A weekend later of experimentation (thanks to one very kick-butt gem on that has an amazing way of managing trees) "actually, we may just be able to - it's going to be a long road though - setting expectations..."

A period of time later we've now implemented a full BOM planning/tracking system, tested well upto and beyond the numbers of items these types of companies expect.

To the point they cancelled their renewal with a big/established ERP vendor and went with us instead.

There's definitely some instances where speed to market trumps everything else. We can go optimise queries later on.

What's been fascinating is I left my day job 2 years ago (to the month). We've gone from unheard of to becoming the market leader in our space. There is absolutely no way that could have been done with any other stack (without spending 5x the money - and I argue that co-ordinating a bigger developer team it almost wouldn't matter what money you throw at it, it gets exponentially harder getting everyone on the same page for delivery).

At my old workplace I couldn't convince the .NET team for love nor money to look outside the box.

[neonsunset]

Because Ruby and especially RoR is a strict downgrade in every dimension compared to .NET. Now, these developers could have been using old .NET Framework, in which case we usually pretend they don’t exist because it’s like stubborn Python 2 of .NET that is otherwise the most productive platform for back-end (with really, really good performance).

[RowanH]

> Because Ruby and especially RoR is a strict downgrade in every dimension compared to .NET.

And that line of thinking is damaging in the tech world. There is no one ring to rule them all. Each tool, language, framework has a place - everything has tradeoffs.

I've worked with enough .NET world to know what the tradeoffs would have been.

For instance the critical library that enabled this piece of functionality, the nearest thing in .NET world looks to have 1 star on github, last updated 4 years ago. The ruby gem has 1.8k stars, tonnes of commits and upto date.

So if you were to implement that in .NET you would be (a) hitting the books (b) re-writing that library or (c) doing a hugely in-effecient/naive implementation that wouldn't scale.

In RoR land - drop in the gem and be prototyping that afternoon.

Sure if I was VC backed, and had money to burn, it might be a bit more interesting to use .NET - if were targetting more enterprise oriented clients and potentially wanted an on prem option, then yeah - .NET. Wanting more access to developers in our country - .NET, that's the predominant market. Etc etc.

In our use case RoR isn't a downgrade.

[azurelake]

Curious what the gem is?

[RowanH]

closure_tree

[azurelake]

Thank you!

[neonsunset]

Ruby is subjectively a worse language than C#, it has worse tooling (as testified by Ruby developers), worse expressiveness and, most of all, much worse performance.

If there isn't an SDK for something in .NET but is in Ruby, it speaks for the poor quality of an engineering culture in that company (as it is likely they offer Java SDK at the same time). And even in that case, you can just generate a client from OpenAPI manifest. Or a gRPC client from .proto (even better). Or if it's an algorithm, you're much better positioned with all the low-level tools C# offers to write something performant with reasonable amount of effort.

And even if that doesn't work, you can just call C bindings by using one of many existing binding generators or just `[LibraryImport]` the calls directly with little effort, after all, C# is a proper C language with C structs and pointers.

But most importantly, you get robust results and consistently good performing application with no scalability issues, good build system and very little risk of accidentally breaking the codebase.

And you don't need to make a developer productivity tradeoff in order to achieve that. I don't know when the bad reputation has to go away, but surely we're long past that point.

[choilive]

I will admit that the .NET ecosystem has gotten way better since being more friendly towards Linux users/environments and I used to code a lot of C#.

I love both Ruby and C# - I don't think one is better than the other. Ruby also has good interop with C. The performance of Ruby is good enough for most use cases. Scaling a Ruby app via multi-process scaling has worked perfectly fine without major issues for most use cases. The open-source 3rd party libraries in the Rails world have a certain "feel" to them.. as if they were written by devs that care a LOT about the - excuse the trendy term- DevEx that are often missing in the C# world.

Call it bias due to familiarity but Rails continues to remain the most productive option to bootstrap a web app/startup for me. Often I think most of the dissonance is simply due to difference in philosophy. Devs don't like Rails because its not "their way" and not that it is inherently better.

Pick the tools you like to use, most productive with, and most appropriate for the application - thats it. No need to nitpick on language semantics, tooling, or performance if those are not even major considerations for what you are building.