355 comments
philip1209 · 20 hours ago
For the hundreds of people reading this article right now - you might be amused to know that you're accessing it from a mac mini on my desk:

https://www.contraption.co/a-mini-data-center/

(The CPU load from this is pretty negligible).

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graypegg · 21 hours ago
I really like web apps that are just CRUD forms. It obviously doesn't work for everything, but the "list of X -> form -> updated list of X" user experience works really well for a lot of problem domains, especially ones that interact with the real world. It lets you name your concepts, and gives everything a really sensible place to change it. "Do I have an appointment, let me check the list of appointments".

Contrast that, to more "app-y" patterns, that might have some unifying calendar, or mix things into a dashboard. Those patterns are also useful!! And of course, all buildable in rails as well. But there is something nice about the simplicity of CRUD apps when I end up coming across one.

So even though you can build in any style with whatever technology you want:

Rails feels like it _prefers_ you build "1 model = 1 concept = 1 REST entity"

Next.js (+ many other FE libraries in this react-meta-library group) feels like it _prefers_ you build "1 task/view = mixed concepts to accomplish a task = 1 specific screen"

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Sincere6066 · 12 hours ago
Why is the ruby/rails community so weird. Half of us just quietly make stuff, but the other half seems to need to sporadically reassure everyone that it's not dead, actually.

> Rails has started to show its age amid with the current wave of AI-powered applications.

Not everything needs to have bloody AI.

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teleforce · 5 hours ago
It's very interesting to note that you can build and maintain meta web framework like RoR with Ruby, Django and even D language.

Go and Rust are amazing languages, but why can’t they produce a Rails-like framework?

Is it just a matter of time before Go/Rust create a Rails-like framework, or is something fundamental preventing it?

Perhaps this article by Patrick Li (author of Stanza language) has the answers [1].

[1] Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead:

https://lbstanza.org/purpose_of_programming_languages.html

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mbell · 19 hours ago
> Rails has started to show its age amid with the current wave of AI-powered applications. It struggles with LLM text streaming, parallel processing in Ruby

Not at all my experience, actually it was incredibly easy to get this working smoothly with hotwire and no javascript at all (outside the hotwire lib).

We have a Rails app with thousands of users streaming agentic chat interfaces, we've had no issues at all with this aspect of things.

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