“What Makes Ruby on Rails Stand Out? Advantages Compared to JavaScript and Python”
Advantages of Ruby Over JavaScript and Python
- Easy to read and write
- Strong community support
- Great for building web apps
Why Start-Up Websites Choose Ruby on Rails
- Quick prototype development
- Faster initial launch
- Migration to other frameworks for scalability
Why Choose Ruby on Rails for Complex Websites?
- Robust features for rapid development
- Efficient handling of complex tasks
- Streamlined workflow for developers
#RubyonRails #JavaScript #Python #WebDevelopment #Startups #FrameworkComparison #Nodejs #Flask #Django #ComplexWebsites
Cause i am a sucker for pretty girls on trains?
Ruby on Rails is extremely fast to get something up and running. And it was popular 10 or so years ago.
Javascript is primarily front end. There is NodeJs which is backend, but it’s Javascript plus some additional server features.
Ruby on Rails became popular because of the idea of “opinionated” programming. In the early days of web dev, it was thought that developers should have ultimate flexibility and ultimate configurability. This wasn’t such a great idea.
One company would do things one way in terms of architecting things. Another would do it another. So if you were at company X and moved to company Y, you could spend a lot of time just understanding the structure of what’s going on (of course, there’s dealing with the actual code).
RoR said, do it our way, and things will be good. Don’t do it our way, and things will be a huge pain. But it meant RoR apps tended to be structured similarly. Other frameworks adopted this idea as well realizing constraining how a web app looks would be good.
They most likely moved to other languages because Ruby is not particularly fast. Neither is Python, but Python, at least for some kinds of apps, has a foreign function interface, that is, it can call methods that look like Python, but are implemented in C. Ruby never did that. Python also managed to get used in universities, got popular in numerical methods, data science, data visualization.
Meanwhile Ruby kinda coasted on RoR which was big in 2006, but faded. There was also some glamor around RoR. It was created by this Danish guy DHH who was doing a senior project (I think it was some kind of Wiki). He was also working remotely for a Chicago based company called 37 signals. He extracted out the web parts from the application. I think he got into Ruby because Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt translated some Ruby documentation from Japanese to English (or something to that effect) and DHH found that and began coding in Ruby.
At the time, he was something of a rock star (I did seem him at a conference once, at a distance). But Ruby failed to take advantage of its hotness like Python did.
It seems a bunch of RoR folks who were having a tough time with jobs decided to start bootcamps which is why a number of bootcamps used RoR. At the time, there were lots of options for Python, but RoR was the main one (eventually, there was Sinatra).
Python had something called Pylons. Actually, even Django has an interesting history having been developed by some folks working for an online newspaper.
Yeah, I’m old and while I was not a Ruby developer or a Python developer, I did attend a Railsconf and a Rubyconf and even Pycon, just for fun.
My two cents, the advantage of Ruby is not technical. It’s that ruby has “programmer happiness” as a core priority of its design. Of course, everyone has different ideas of what makes them happy, but ruby tries. JS python etc have other priorites like speed, “ease”, memory, etc.
I use ruby becasue I think it’s fun. It makes *me* happy. I like the way the code reads. I like the syntactic sugar as I write.
I don’t see stories about people saying “mmm, yeah, I love javascript.” or “i chose python because of significant whitespace”
The anecdotes I’ve read is that Ruby on Rails makes it really easy and fun to get started. That’s what “rails” means: train tracks, follow this guide. But once you get to millions and billions of users, then “developer happiness” is no longer important. The other traits like execution speed and shareholder value become more important.
Meanwhile, other languages have also copied technical concepts from ruby. So new projects just continue using the language already in use instead of trying ruby.