Comment by princevegeta89 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by princevegeta89 | Hacker News Reader

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I used Ruby a lot a long time ago and built medium to large scale enterprise apps on the Rails framework before I moved on to other projects involving Golang and Elixir. Somehow I had more fun and more safety working with Elixir, which was only just getting started as a brand new language trying to establish itself.

It was only after working with Go that I realized how much compile-time safety and performance I was missing out on with Ruby.There's no doubt I would use Ruby today again, but I can't imagine going further beyond simple scripts and workflows. I have recently tried building a very small website with Rails, and I was somewhat surprised the framework did not mature all that much, and type safety and IDE support still seem to be iffy. There is so much unwanted magic that I still see with Ruby on Rails in general. I was looking up to Crystal to address some of the issues I described above, but unfortunately it just remained as a less mature language. Elixir was great, but with the experience I have had, I will actually drop heading into the functional programming world. That leaves me with only one choice, which is Golang. I am not a fan of everything it has, but it is fairly easy for my fellow engineers to pick up, and the IDE support has been nothing short of fantastic.

This is really really a big stretch, but I have always been hopeful towards looking for a TypeScript sort of compile-time layer for Ruby. It may probably never happen though, sadly.

Sorbet helps. We’ve even created a typed HTML template engine and it helps catch a lot but also allows using the Sorbet LSP to rename things and of course correct autocomplete.

> I was looking up to Crystal to address some of the issues I described above, but unfortunately it just remained as a less mature language.

I'd be interested to hear what you find lacking in Crystal, too. For me it would be editor support, last time I tried the LSP I couldn't get it to work.

Last time I checked I heard the compile times were still awful. And the entire community lacking some basic packages and enough developers that it still made it hard to find support or help for issues one may encounter.

Compile times seem fine to me, compared to other code I've compiled. I haven't noticed a particular basic package that's missing either, but that may depend on who is asked. I've also had reasonable responses from the existing devs, it feels more like Ruby in the late 2000's (friendlier, less political).

> but with the experience I have had, I will actually drop heading into the functional programming world

Could you elaborate on this? It's a valid resolution, but I consider Elixir to be on the pragmatic side of the functional paradigm, so I'm wondering what pushed you away.

Sure, this was a few years ago. Don't get me wrong, I liked it, but all the other existing and new engineers on my team have expressed a lot of concern about the entire paradigm shift and that Elixir was unnecessarily complicating things in terms of implementing simple logic. A lot of junior engineers also have been unhappy with the kind of shift going away from the traditional procedural/oop styles. If I was working on a solo project, I would pick Elixir over Rails any day. The LSP server and tooling alone makes it stand up very strong.

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