[xtracto]

My company "inherited" some medium-sized Ruby on Rails codebase, and OMG what an abomination it is. Everything is "magic", everything is implicit and to find out what does what is horrible. I've done Ruby development in the past (production API with Sinatra) and it was OK, but I'll never start a "real life" project in Rails.

[coffeecloud]

Read through the Rails docs and you'll learn all the "magic" is pretty easily explainable, mostly just predefined naming conventions and directory structures and a bunch of preconfigured gems.

[tenacious_tuna]

I keep having this discussion with people, including coworkers (my current org is a rails shop).

The thing that drives me nuts about Rails is that the conventions I learned everywhere else break down. There's no goto-definition that works in any sane way, I'm left `ag`ing through the codebase for `def whatever`. The amount of stuff I have to keep in my head to understand what any given object is doing (due to magic) is nuts and exhausting at times.

The general impression I get from Rails and Ruby is a desire to be lexographically terse: fewer characters on screen per unit of business logic. On the one hand, you can fit a lot of code in view at once, which has it's benefits. On the other hand, you're sacrificing explicit data for that terseness, and you have to fall back to holding state in your head.

Without a doubt, Rails is powerful, and there's a lot I've loved about working in the ecosystem, but there's very significant tradeoffs to doing things the Rails way.

[coffeecloud]

Oh I found the goto-definition works pretty well in RubyMine.

I would imagine goto-definition not working well to be more an issue with Ruby being a dynamically typed language and having metaprogramming features like define_method, not the framework. (FWIW I really dislike Ruby despite really liking Rails)

[SkyPuncher]

I love Rails, but the magic is often too much for me.

My many complaint is convention is soft. It has edge cases, divergent thinking, it has unplanned detours. This is especially true in a fast moving environment. I would much prefer that the magic wasn’t so opaque.

For me, 99% Rails is by far my fastest productivity tool. However, that 1% of the time it just sucks.

[ilrwbwrkhv]

Rails indeed has magic but the way Vercel has taken over React and the javascript ecosystem, it is really sad. The author makes some good points about the upselling and the javascript devs are so used to it that they pay the shipfast guy $299 to configure their project which makes the shipfast guy high 5 figure profits every month. Just for selling configuration. I kid you not.

[aeze]

I'd argue there's nothing in RoR that's more 'magic' than "use client/server".

[desireco42]

You should inheris js or next project to feel the real pain :) nothing hurts as much...

[throwaway48540]

On the other hand, inheriting a proper TypeScript project is nothing but joy.

[agentwiggles]

This strongly depends on your definition of proper. I'm currently working in great TS codebase, which was largely architected by one guy, who knows what he's doing and takes grug seriously. It's a really fun and productive project.

The previous project I was on involved a "monorepo" using Nx (which sucks, imo), and a crazily frustrating zeal for abstracting every detail so that any given file contains 4 lines and finding out what anything fucking does involves opening 19 files and testing how many things my aging ex-stoner brain can hold in short term memory before the plates stop spinning and I catch myself wishing I dug ditches for a living, because at least you know when the ditch is done and there's no failed-upward idiot trying to deduplicate every detail of the digging.

So, idk. It can definitely vary.

[throwaway48540]

Option A, if course. I feel you, Option B feels like a visit to Java land, not great at all.

[sparker72678]

Curious: what version of Rails was the codebase was running, and how long it had been around before it landed in your lap(s)?

[ninetyninenine]

Good to start bad to inherit.

I think the key is that ruby is good for kickstarting a business and getting it to a state where the business runs with high execution speed and minimal effort.

Once the business is operational and stable then continuing from there is bad. Usually you will have to change the entire stack and of course from certain perspectives this can be seen as a lack of foresight.

But if you chose to use another technology to start it could be that the speed of execution just wasn't fast enough and your business never reaches that island of stability because the technology just wasn't fast enough.

[DoesntMatter22]

Rails can be pretty much fine unless you hit massive proportions but then you are going to have problems in every language