BTbtown·Oct 7, 2024
I think there's a new and healthy rivalry between Ruby, Python, and JS for web backends!
- Ruby and Rails now has all of the things mentioned above and more. I do have concerns that Rails will evolve in directions where bundled frontends have less official support, with the continued centralization of 37signals/DHH [0] and their controversial removal of Typescript from Turbo [1] (and bundling in general for Hey), but it's such a large community that there will be continued momentum in all directions.
- Python used to be the choice if you expected to do both data processing/machine learning/NLP and web backends in a centralized codebase with a single language. And Django is still a world-class solution there, with gevent + asyncio + forthcoming developments on GIL-less Python all contributing towards making Django a highly performant and p
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arallel framework. That said, with much of an app's data processing complexity often best offloaded towards LLM-powered solutions that have dedicated APIs, and both Ruby [2] and Node having bindings to https://pola.rs/ as an alternative to Pandas, it's no longer the only solution.
- And on the JS end, frameworks that enable full-stack batteries-included admin-out-of-the-box development like https://redwoodjs.com/ and https://www.prisma.io/nextjs + e.g. https://next-admin.js.org/ continue to evolve. Nowadays, if you're building a complex web application from scratch, Prisma provides all the escape hatches you'd need, so that you can build entirely in JS/TS and have the facilities you'd expect from Rails or Django.
I'm really excited that all three communities are continuing to push the boundaries of what's possible; it's amazing to see.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30600746
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37405565
[2] https://github.com/ankane/ruby-polars