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ES6 vs Ruby: What are the differences?
Developers describe ES6 as "The next version of JavaScript". Goals for ECMAScript 2015 include providing better support for large applications, library creation, and for use of ECMAScript as a compilation target for other languages. Some of its major enhancements include modules, class declarations, lexical block scoping, iterators and generators, promises for asynchronous programming, destructuring patterns, and proper tail calls. On the other hand, Ruby is detailed as "A dynamic, interpreted, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity". Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.
ES6 and Ruby can be categorized as "Languages" tools.
"ES6 code is shorter than traditional JS" is the top reason why over 98 developers like ES6, while over 590 developers mention "Programme friendly" as the leading cause for choosing Ruby.
Ruby is an open source tool with 15.9K GitHub stars and 4.25K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Ruby's open source repository on GitHub.
Airbnb, Instacart, and StackShare are some of the popular companies that use Ruby, whereas ES6 is used by Slack, StackShare, and ebay. Ruby has a broader approval, being mentioned in 2530 company stacks & 1140 developers stacks; compared to ES6, which is listed in 1461 company stacks and 1725 developer stacks.
I was considering focusing on learning RoR and looking for a work that uses those techs.
After some investigation, I decided to stay with C# .NET:
It is more requested on job positions (7 to 1 in my personal searches average).
It's been around for longer.
it has better documentation and community.
One of Ruby advantages (its amazing community gems, that allows to quickly build parts of your systems by merely putting together third party components) gets quite complicated to use and maintain in huge applications, where building and reusing your own components may become a better approach.
Rail's front end support is starting to waver.
C# .NET code is far easier to understand, debug and maintain. Although certainly not easier to learn from scratch.
Though Rails has an excellent programming speed, C# tends to get the upper hand in long term projects.
I would avise to stick to rails when building small projects, and switching to C# for more long term ones.
Opinions are welcome!
We have a lot of experience in JavaScript, writing our services in NodeJS allows developers to transition to the back end without any friction, without having to learn a new language. There is also the option to write services in TypeScript, which adds an expressive type layer. The semi-shared ecosystem between front and back end is nice as well, though specifically NodeJS libraries sometimes suffer in quality, compared to other major languages.
As for why we didn't pick the other languages, most of it comes down to "personal preference" and historically grown code bases, but let's do some post-hoc deduction:
Go is a practical choice, reasonably easy to learn, but until we find performance issues with our NodeJS stack, there is simply no reason to switch. The benefits of using NodeJS so far outweigh those of picking Go. This might change in the future.
PHP is a language we're still using in big parts of our system, and are still sometimes writing new code in. Modern PHP has fixed some of its issues, and probably has the fastest development cycle time, but it suffers around modelling complex asynchronous tasks, and (on a personal note) lack of support for writing in a functional style.
We don't use Python, Elixir or Ruby, mostly because of personal preference and for historic reasons.
Rust, though I personally love and use it in my projects, would require us to specifically hire for that, as the learning curve is quite steep. Its web ecosystem is OK by now (see https://www.arewewebyet.org/), but in my opinion, it is still no where near that of the other web languages. In other words, we are not willing to pay the price for playing this innovation card.
Haskell, as with Rust, I personally adore, but is simply too esoteric for us. There are problem domains where it shines, ours is not one of them.
In 2015 as Xelex Digital was paving a new technology path, moving from ASP.NET web services and web applications, we knew that we wanted to move to a more modular decoupled base of applications centered around REST APIs.
To that end we spent several months studying API design patterns and decided to use our own adaptation of CRUD, specifically a SCRUD pattern that elevates query params to a more central role via the Search action.
Once we nailed down the API design pattern it was time to decide what language(s) our new APIs would be built upon. Our team has always been driven by the right tool for the job rather than what we know best. That said, in balancing practicality we chose to focus on 3 options that our team had deep experience with and knew the pros and cons of.
For us it came down to C#, JavaScript, and Ruby. At the time we owned our infrastructure, racks in cages, that were all loaded with Windows. We were also at a point that we were using that infrastructure to it's fullest and could not afford additional servers running Linux. That's a long way of saying we decided against Ruby as it doesn't play nice on Windows.
That left us with two options. We went a very unconventional route for deciding between the two. We built MVP APIs on both. The interfaces were identical and interchangeable. What we found was easily quantifiable differences.
We were able to iterate on our Node based APIs much more rapidly than we were our C# APIs. For us this was owed to the community coupled with the extremely dynamic nature of JS. There were tradeoffs we considered, latency was (acceptably) higher on requests to our Node APIs. No strong types to protect us from ourselves, but we've rarely found that to be an issue.
As such we decided to commit resources to our Node APIs and push it out as the core brain of our new system. We haven't looked back since. It has consistently met our needs, scaling with us, getting better with time as continually pour into and expand our capabilities.
In December we successfully flipped around half a billion monthly API requests from our Ruby on Rails application to some new Python 3 applications. Our Head of Engineering has written a great article as to why we decided to transition from Ruby on Rails to Python 3! Read more about it in the link below.
This post is a bit of an obvious one, as we have a web application, we obviously need to have HTML
and CSS
in our stack. Though specifically though, we can talk a bit about backward compatibility and the specific approaches we want to enforce in our codebase.
HTML
: Not much explanation here, you have to interact with HTML for a web app. We will stick to the latest standard: HTML 5
.
CSS
: Again if we want to style any of our components within he web, we have to use to style it. Though we will be taking advantage of JSS
in our code base and try to minimize the # of CSS stylesheets and include all our styling within the components themselves. This leaves the codebase much cleaner and makes it easier to find styles!
Babel
: We understand that not every browser is able to support the cool new features of the latest node/JS features (such as redue, filter, etc) seen in ES6
. We will make sure to have the correct Babel
configuration o make our application backward compatible.
Material UI (MUI)
: We need to make our user interface as intuitive and pretty as possible within his MVP, and the UI framework used by Google will provide us with exactly that. MUI provides pretty much all the UI components you would need and allows heavy customization as well. Its vast # of demos will allow us to add components quickly and not get too hung up on making UI components.
We will be using the latest version of create-react-app
which bundles most of the above along many necessary frameworks (e.g. Jest for testing) to get started quickly.
For our front-end, React is chosen because it is easy to develop with due to its reusable components and state functions, in addition to a lot of community support. Because React is popular, it would be easy to hire for it here at our company MusiCore. Our team also has experience with React already. React can be written with ES6 and ES6 has a lot of popularity and versatility when it comes to creating classes and efficient functions. Node.js will be used as a runtime environment to compile the code. Node.js also has many different types of open-source packages that can help automate some of the tasks we want to do for the application. CSS 3 will be used to style components and is the standard for that.
Optimize-js
I will not describe this tool a lot here, because it's already good done by author on github
I just want to mention that this tool wrap up all immediately-invoked functions or likely-to-be-invoked functions in parentheses what is do a great optimization a JavaScript
file for faster initial execution and parsing (based on my experience).
The performance of application where I've introduced optimize-js
improved on 20% in a common (tested in Chrome
and IE11
).
- Clarification on Readme to the optimize-js
- Some of Nolan thoughts on the virtues of compile-time optimizations can be found in "Parens and Performance" – counterpost
Is it maintaining now? - Unfortunately, no (but feel free to send PR)
When I was evaluating languages to write this app in, I considered either Python or JavaScript at the time. I find Ruby very pleasant to read and write, and the Ruby community has built out a wide variety of test tools and approaches, helping e deliver better software faster. Along with Rails, and the Ruby-first Heroku support, this was an easy decision.
Pros of ES6
- ES6 code is shorter than traditional JS109
- Module System Standardized52
- Extremly compact2
- Destructuring Assignment2
Pros of Ruby
- Programme friendly605
- Quick to develop536
- Great community490
- Productivity468
- Simplicity432
- Open source273
- Meta-programming234
- Powerful207
- Blocks156
- Powerful one-liners139
- Flexible69
- Easy to learn58
- Easy to start51
- Maintainability42
- Lambdas37
- Procs30
- Fun to write21
- Diverse web frameworks19
- Reads like English13
- Makes me smarter and happier10
- Rails9
- Very Dynamic8
- Elegant syntax8
- Matz6
- Object Oriented5
- Programmer happiness5
- Elegant code4
- Generally fun but makes you wanna cry sometimes4
- Friendly4
- Fun and useful4
- Easy packaging and modules3
- There are so many ways to make it do what you want3
- Primitive types can be tampered with2
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Cons of ES6
- Suffers from baggage1
Cons of Ruby
- Memory hog7
- Really slow if you're not really careful7
- Nested Blocks can make code unreadable3
- Encouraging imperative programming2
- Ambiguous Syntax, such as function parentheses1