HACKER Q&A
📣 mraza007

Is it worth learning Ruby on Rails in 2023


Hello HN,

So I have been planning to build a SaaS and Ruby on Rails sounds very promising framework as it has been used by many big name companies. Even though I know Django but I planning to get out of my comfort zone and try something new.

  👤 steviee Accepted Answer ✓
Ruby is a fantastic language and Rails gives lots of opportunities to go fast when adding new functionality to your product. The community is great and while there are different opinions about how to evolve Rails there is other frameworks like Hanami and libraries that don't need Rails.

In the end what matters is that you can produce the functions that make your product valuable to your customers. You need to Do it on a daily basis and always on time. Ruby on Rails helps you with that.

General advice: Do not choose the tech stack for generating your income by following fashion. It is a marathon and not a sprint after all.

👤 t312227
hello,

idk / imho. ... to you want to work on an 1.) "experimental" or "learning project" or 2.) a "serious" one, where you need an MVP fast!?

if 1.) use whatever floats your boat.

if 2.) use whatever tool for the job in question you already know best - for me in your case it sounds like: python django ;)

just my 0.02€

👤 ralmidani
I’ve built toy apps with Ruby/Rails and larger apps with Python/Django. Honestly, I like Django more for its less implicit approach, ORM with automatically generated migrations for common cases, and great ecosystem (check out Django REST Framework, Django Filter, Django Reactor, and Django Unicorn, to name a few) If you already like Django and have learned its ins and outs, time spent learning Rails would be better spent actually building something with Django. Also, a lot of big, successful companies have been built with Django, among them Pinterest and Instagram.

With that said, if you want to try something new and need something better suited for scalable, real-time applications, the combination of Elixir & Phoenix is similar to Rails but also less implicit, and it runs on a battled-tested runtime with fault-tolerance and low latency built in.

Finally, if you’re building a CRUD-ish SAAS app that needs a constant server connection, check out Phoenix LiveView for a very robust and dev-friendly solution. For the type of apps it was meant for, it’s really the technology to beat (I use it for my day job)!