Ask HN: Go vs. Ruby/Rails for first time indie dev?

I would recommend Rails (or Django, or Laravel), not because Golang is a bad language, but because it's just a language where as Rails is a fully-featured web framework that will do a lot of stuff for you out of the box (authentication, sessions, database access and ORM, templates, etc).

If you choose Ruby, rspec and rspec-expectations (https://relishapp.com/rspec/rspec-expectations/docs) grant you very powerful abilities to write unit tests for your APIs out of the box. You can pretty much mock anything from method calls to network responses.

Also, when running an rspec test that touches/creates/modifies ActiveRecord database objects, the rspec scaffold will automatically create a new database transaction for running your test so that the test database you are using is not affected.

In general, don't worry if the Ruby that you write looks nothing like the concise and sometimes 'magic' Ruby that more experienced developers can produce. You'll get there when you get there. Try to learn as much about Enumerables as you can https://ruby-doc.org/core/Enumerable.html

Vue.js is a good choice. Not as popular as React... yet.

Rails, as other commenters have noted, has a learning curve. As long as you try to stick within the normal usages of Rails, you should be fine.

Whatever you do with Rails, stay far away from their template markup languages (haml). Write the front-end in Vue.js, consuming APIs, don't do any server-side rendering of anything. If you really want to do server-side front-end, ditch Ruby/Rails and just go full blown Node.js front and back end.

Good luck, just get started!

> Whatever you do with Rails, stay far away from their template markup languages (haml). Write the front-end in Vue.js, consuming APIs, don't do any server-side rendering of anything.

This is far from a consensus opinion. Depending on your application you can actually get great results with Turbolinks, meaning you write very little client side code. It's worth reading up on that option as well.

Ok, we can agree to disagree. Given the OP’s stated personal choice of using Vue.js, I assume that they want to build a SPA.

In my understanding, using Turbolinks makes use of most every JavaScript client-side framework, including Vue.js, more difficult as the JavaScript components have to be adapted to work with Turbolink caching.

Indeed, I wouldn't recommend using them together either if OP goes with Vue.

Thanks for the clarification, we will agree to agree :) I still have not-so-fond memories of using Rails 4.x to render HAML partials to "support" basic JavaScript dynamic interactivity.

If you don't have any coding experience, maybe just do a server-rendered app - less to learn. For this, RoR will be a great choice.

What are you trying to make? A social network? A highly interactive web app?

Could you build your app by generating HTML on the server, including some JavaScript and returning it? That's how old reddit, Hacker News, Stack Overflow, and no-JS Amazon are built.

It seems you've done your homework choosing Vue.js and narrowing down the backend choices.

I myself know/use way too many languages/frameworks. I do very (most?) often choose Vue/Go and stongly recommend this combo. I also use Ruby/Rails at my day job.

Go is mature enough but isn't as comprehensive as the Rails ecosystem. Rails is a good framework but still has a deep learning curve. Most of your back-end will be simple database/json requests. It's easier to be self-sufficient with Go, with Rails I always feel like I'm using so many things I don't fully understand.

There will be enough Go libraries for doing the common things you will want to do.

Thanks for sharing your experience with Go and Ruby/Rails. I have been a little concerned about putting in a lot of time into learning Rails, since I get the feeling that web dev might be heading more towards Go in the future. If the libraries are mostly far along enough for what I need at this point, I'll probably give Go a try first. Thanks!

Use each for a week or two. Whatever makes you productive and happy, use it. Most projects aren't going to have special requirements or don't need to scale to millions of users (not at the beginning anyway). So it would make sense to pick a tech stack that makes one comfortable and productive.

If you do have any special requirements (real time, video rendering, scaling to a ton of users etc) then it would be good to spend time looking at the pros and cons of various tech stacks

> I don't like the idea of needing to learn both Elixir and Erlang

You dont need to learn Erlang to use Elixir, rather you would need to know Elixir to use Phoenix; like you need to know Ruby to use Rails.

Also you can build a Twitter timeline clone in under 18 minutes using Phoenix LiveView: https://youtu.be/MZvmYaFkNJI

You don't have any prior coding experience! That may become an issue. Start small, save your social media project for later.

As a php and golang developer I would say if you are starting out and want to see results quickly - try ruby on rails. Ruby is dynamically typed interpreted language, you won't need to recompile every time you make a change and learning curve should be more approachable than rust or go.

I didn't realize I'd have to recompile Golang code after every change. That's good to know. Thanks!

The Go compiler is really fast, effectively hot-reloads on every save.

https://github.com/cosmtrek/air

You'll be fine with both.

I'm happy to clear up some things but in the end your language/framework choice doesn't matter as much as long as you are comfortable. Just start doing.

> I'd like to start making a social media web project and I'm wondering if I should use Golang or Ruby/Rails on the back-end?

They are very different things.

RoR is a web-framework. There is a clear path to the whole process of writing a web-application. Interacting with a database, auth, routing, code-generation, structure... Using a web-framework you can lean on years of experience, tutorials, documentation etc.

Go is just a language. Granted it has an extremely useful standard library and is basically designed with web-servers in mind (among other things). But you'll need to make decisions yourself as of which libraries you want to pull in to achieve the same feature set as with a framework. There are also web-frameworks in Go you can choose from.

> I don't have any prior coding experience.

Both Go and Ruby are very accessible languages. I suggest you go through some tutorials, look at some code and see which language sparks more interest.

> I've been reading a lot online about how Object Oriented Programming makes maintaining code difficult in the long term, which makes me think Golang might be a better choice than Ruby.

My opinion: You've been reading the wrong type of articles. OOP is very much a useful paradigm applied to many, well working, huge code bases. And it is one of many paradigms that are useful. There are some people who "overdo" paradigms. Be pragmatic, not dogmatic.

At this stage, just trace along with w/e is "idiomatic" (AKA how most people write). The code you'll write will be beginner level code anyways, which is fine.

Programming paradigms like Object Orientation, Functional Programming, Procedural Programming, Event Driven Programming, Data Driven Programming and so on are just tools.

You'll learn them along the way as you get a deeper understanding. They are all useful in the right context, with the right language when solving a particular problem.

Just write simple code and try to keep it reasonably DRY. Clean up stuff you don't need from time to time. Write comments so you get why you did a thing in a particular way. Don't worry about paradigms. They don't matter until you know they matter and they are not a style attribute but something you use.

> which makes me think Golang might be a better choice than Ruby.

Go is a multi-paradigm language. You can write idiomatic OO code in Go and many do. Abstraction through interfaces, polymorphism though composition, message passing through dynamic dispatch (or in some cases channels), local retention through private fields and error values are all corner stones of modern OO and Go has a very clean way to use them if needed.

> Also, Golang's speed sounds like it would help to keep my server costs low if my site were to get some traffic.

At this stage the bigger money saver will be using a language (and framework/libraries) that you will be motivated to use (fun) and just jive with you will have a larger impact on your wallet and productivity. Then, when you get more experienced you will learn about performance and how to optimize for certain things. In short: Don't worry about it yet.

> How does Golang's ecosystem for web dev compare to Ruby on Rails currently? I know that Ruby has lots of gems (devise, etc) to make web dev faster. Does Golang's ecosystem have similar tools at this point?

If your happy with making a lot of decisions on your own then you'll be fine with "just" Go. Just keep in mind that as a beginner, there are a lot of things you are not thinking about right now. Using a battle-proven framework will avoid common pitfalls.

In any case, w/o trying to sound patronizing: start reading articles that don't want to sell you opinions and products but are actually technical and useful. Start with these for example:

https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/web-security-basics.ht...

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web

These kind of articles are not flowery opinionated things. Just dry, technical, pragmatic stuff. developer.mozilla.org is a fantastic reference for people who work with the web.

> On the front-end, I think I'd be most interested in using Vue.js from what I've read.

Great idea. Vue.js is very beginner friendly and has has great tooling around it.

Thanks! This info is very helpful!

Here is the only useful answer you'll get:

Use whichever you feel more comfortable with and productive in. Either will work just fine.