I mostly work in Rails, but when I have to hop into a node project, it feels like I'm stepping back into PHP in terms of sheer madness.
Barely any convention, lots of repetition and configuration - all things Rails specifically set out to solve.
Barely any convention, lots of repetition and configuration - all things Rails specifically set out to solve.
I haven't even tried to setup dev environments for python, php or js on Windows. It is just so easy to use WSL2.
PHP should have made a much bigger push early on; mark the weird and unsafe functions as deprecated and point to e.g. prepared statement alternatives. They should have built a package / dependency manager much earlier on. And they should have made a lot more efforts to get a developer community up and running.
These conversations always tend to go the same way; someone complains about PHP and then later admits it's based on their experience 5-10+ years ago. PHP has come a long way and is worth checking out if you're into web development.
PHP has mage huge strides in typing too, I havent kept up with Ruby to know if they do the same
Sorbet is trying, but it's... not there yet (although getting better).
But Crystal has around 468 open bugs at the time of writing :(
https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/labels/kind%3Abug
Issues are well over 1k…
[0] https://rubyinrails.com/2017/07/21/rails-introduces-active-s...
Basically it comes down to magical behavior, and the fact that Rails has way too much of it. Syntactic sugar and DSLs are maybe fine for rolling out new projects, but become burdensome on large codebases. I was on a large project and found myself in goto hell where I literally couldn't trace through the code. It was relying on every magic trick in the book to make the code as small and cute as possible, but failed utterly to provide anchors in the code where "this happens here" or breadcrumbs connecting chunks of code. It was a giant hodgepodge of I don't know what. Really clean spaghetti code I guess.
Now, Laravel has its own warts, but they aren't conceptual warts. For example, the stack traces in Laravel are way too tall, with way too many factories and patterns in the vendor code. I feel that things like the IoC container were not implemented as well as they should be. The goto hell in Laravel happens around stuff like the bootstrap process, registering service providers, queuing, etc. They made some mistakes in scattering those things around instead of handling them in one central place. Pretty much all classes provide 95% of what you need, but adding missing functionality yourself requires learning the entirety of the package (in fairness, this happens with pretty much all platforms). There's a tendency for Laravel projects to not support helper functions or custom classes in a standardized way, so sometimes it's hard to find business logic. Not nearly as hard as in Rails though. But as a whole, I'd take conceptually clean interfaces with mundane implementations and no surprises over magical behavior any day.
Just to not leave anyone out - I wouldn't implement business logic in any Javascript framework. I feel that async basically makes it impossible to do it deterministically. I'm sorry that happened to Javascript and am still in mourning about it, because it had some advantages over PHP in how it treated associative array access with "[]" the same way as object member access with "." which could have been used in PHP to implement copy-on-write everywhere and really set it apart from all other imperative languages. Mistakes were made in both, and Ruby as well, that took them all in directions that I wouldn't have chosen.
Today I mostly write solutions in a synchronous-blocking, functional-reactive, event-driven, immutable, stateless, data-driven, declarative manner that tries to avoid custom types/objects, manually managing nulls or asynchronous behavior. Which if all orchestrated correctly, leads to future-proof code because it's so obvious that it's self-documenting and the failure modes are all safe.
IMHO, the vast majority of software out there involving Javascript, Ruby, Python, really any of the imperative languages, can't achieve what I'm trying to do. It even feels like they actively work against me sometimes. I think of Laravel as getting most of the interfaces and approaches conceptually correct, even if the internals use factories and patterns and hand waving that I consider spaghetti. Whereas Rails involves some element of drinking the kool-aid, because it encourages some conceptually incorrect approaches like ignoring process separation to achieve better performance or fit with some preexisting notion of what's beautiful or easy. Along those lines, probably stuff like Phoenix/Elixer, Erlang, etc are closest to what I'm working towards, but they introduce their own custom syntax that strikes me as perhaps too DSL-like and I have an aversion to that. Which is the main reason why I struggle to learn stuff like Haskell.
There truly are vanishly few actually good solutions today, and I've been following web development for over 25 years now. That used to really get me down. But I realize now that the situation presents an opportunity to fix things and build a better future, which I am grateful for.
The issue is more that Node and JavaScript in general is too popular and there are way more options whereas ruby is rarely used for non rails work.
How is it a bad thing? Again, JavaScript is far more popular than all of those for web related development. The issue is that like you're stating, there isn't a single main option perse. I'd use NestJS.
That probably has more to do with PHP being such an easy language to get started with, inviting a lot of rookies/cowboys to the party.
Express isn't terrible; it's just more like Sinatra.