I know Ruby is still used in some codebases but what's its actual relevance in the webdev/fullstack landscape? I am currently 5 months into learning Elixir/Phoenix for fullstack and I already know a few Js based frameworks. Ruby always intruiged me, but I'd like to stay employable
I'd say Ruby is more relevant than Elixir. But you're correct (IMO) that Ruby had a big moment but has died down since. At one point it almost felt like the default choice in startup land. Not so today.
Ruby on Rails specifically has a batteries included approach that lets you get up and running very quickly. But my perception is that as JavaScript has leaked into the server (benefits of writing the same language on front and back end) it's eaten into Ruby's mindshare. Python also finally moved on from its 2 vs 3 nightmare and shares many of the benefits of Ruby.
Yea, I am tackling Elixir to avoid learning tech specifically designed for solving scaling issues with languages not made for scaling. Elixir is wonderful for this. How's Ruby considering scaling and performance? I always compare Ruby on Rails to Laravel for some reason
I did Ruby on rails professionally for many years, and have also done elix Phoenix professionally for many years now, and I would advise you to continue with Phoenix. Getting really good at elixir and Phoenix can make you an extremely powerful and employable developer. Should you find yourself in a situation where you need to switch to Ruby and rails, you will have a huge leg up because rails follow as many of the same patterns as Phoenix, and the Ruby language is very simple to learn for someone coming from elixir. Just my two cents of course
that's great advice, but finding Elixir/Phoenix jobs seems to be few and far between (and seem to be for less pay). Where are you able to find your Elixir / Phoenix jobs?
You typically choose Ruby on Rails because you want to get up and running fast, not because you want performance. That said, in most RoR codebases the performance bottleneck is networking, database etc not the language itself. As and when e.g. the database becomes a bottleneck there are various mitigations available to you.
In a way, Rails is the OG for rapid application development considering its influence and impact on tech startups over the 2010s.
These days you'd build a blog in 20 minutes by vibe coding it in Cursor and deploying it on to some serverless edge compute platform or something.
Almost 20 years ago you'd build a blog in 20 minutes by installing rails and running a few commands on the terminal to generate the UI, backend, DB schema/migrations and all that, and then `git push heroku master` to see it deployed on the web. Quickly enough you'd git gud and wouldn't need to lean on the scaffolding tools.
At least in London there's still a pretty strong market for it, and the overlap in syntax between Ruby and Elixir is enough that you could take your pick (the Elixir shops I know of will look for experienced Ruby engineers by default because the pool of Elixir engineers is much smaller).
Could you point out where do you get your data from? Anything to back-up your claims that Rails is in decline and Elixir/Phoenix is growing? For a time not long ago I was heavily into looking for an Elixir gig, but couldn't really find offers, while there were still tons of offers for Rails development.
You scale Rails by adding servers (or containers) behind a load balancer and by scaling up the database server in the same ways you would do it for another server technology, including Phoenix.
By the way, I've seen many more Rails projects than Phoenix ones but they share the same general architecture: (server or containers) + db. The only difference is that we usually run Ruby jobs inside sidekiq and we use Tasks or GenServers for Elixir jobs. We wrote our own code to restart and try again jobs that eventually failed (we can't lose a job because of a deploy or a reboot.)
Yes, Redis is usually the backing store for Rails' Sidekiq.
With Elixir we stored the job data in a PostgreSQL table and started a process with the id of that record as argument.
When we had to restart the BEAM (deploy, reboot, anything) a process would look at that table and start a process for every record not marked as complete. If a process failed too many times and its supervisor gave up on it, we could restart it manually by calling a function in the console with the record id as argument. Or we could start all the processes of a given type at once, or all of them.
So we basically wrote a small subset of Redis and of Sidekiq admin.
Use whatever you feel most effective in. I would say Ruby is around much more than you might expect by the sounds of it. (The usual big names touted on the Rails homepage + many start ups + agency products) though it's definitely over the hype period.
For being employable... I'd say Ruby is going to be near the middle of the pack. Elixir is going to be near the harder-side, and JS is going to be near the easier-side... on average IMO.
If you think ruby intrigues you, give it a try! You've got precious time + motivation for this sort of thing, but messing around with a programming language is not much effort if you're intrigued. Getting a feel for it is a sub-weekend project away. It's my favourite language for bodging, the scripts I make in ruby for little data-mashing or system things are surprisingly stable and readable, even a year or two later. (Compared to a nodejs, perl or shell script... which all tend to have understandability-half-lives of a month for me haha) Automate something you find annoying.
We actually use Prawn PDF at work so I have soooome degree of contact to Ruby already, I might check it out at some point. Thanks for the detailed answer!
Rails/Ruby is still top 10 on Github landscape in Pull Requests. Though it's lived through a relative decline people talk about it less because a lot of other frameworks and languages have improved in light of what the ecosystem had.
That said I feel like Elixir/Phoenix is doing a lot of things right today and if I were invested in one or the other I'd stick with that one. But I'm more of a bootstrapper than someone who looks for a job. Ruby is #8 in Pull Requests and Elixir #24 on Github. Source: https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2024/1
If I were just looking to be marketable I'd consider Python, Java or Go... but I don't love working in those languages as much as I do Ruby (or Elixir for that matter).
