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What About Rails?

334 points · 236 comments · jrochkind1

  1. shikck200 · · focus · HN ↗
    Rails, or even more so php have VERY little to bring to the table in 2026 going forward. Rails (ruby) is still a saner language than PHP, but as slow as php is. (granted ruby is not idiotic like PHP and runs rather than start/die).

    If you go the LLM route something like Go is probably the goto default for MOST networking&#x2F;web-first apps. You get static types, and a fast compile cycle (rust is still very slow here), and IF you want more from the language you can use something like Lisette (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lisette.run&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lisette.run&#x2F;).

    Bottom line is dynamic languages are obsolete. There is really no benefits from using them outside very small throw away scripts.

    1. sevenzero · · focus · HN ↗
      Why would I bother with anything but Laravel for small CRUD apps? Not having to think about concurrency is neat, having tons of abstractions built by people with 50x my experience is neat, just being able to get going is neat.

      Building the things I&#x27;ve built using Laravel with Golang would probably take 10x the development time as I have to handcraft everything Laravel already natively provides. Or I have to trust 100 packages from 100 different random devs to simulate the Laravel experience in Golang.

      1. shikck200 · · focus · HN ↗
        With LLMs the language DOES NOT MATTER. The framework DOES NOT MATTER. This is the thing we are talking about here. Laravel is 100% useless for a LLM first project. I can pretty much do anything in vanilla Go i can in Laravel and be 100x more performant, 100x more typesafe, and produce 100x more maintainable systems.

        This is why dynamic languages, and even more so BAD ones like PHP are just useless going into 2027 and the future. Its simple, the language gives you what it gives in perf, builtin RUNTIME features, and COMPILETIME features.

        From that you pick the best for whatever you are building, be it Go, Rust, Ocaml etc. The language does not matter.

        Go has 90% of stuff builtin, you rarely need any dependencies. Look at Laravel ITS A HUGE CODEBASE and a high risk for any real software project. I would stay FAR away from it.

        1. laszlokorte · · focus · HN ↗
          What I do not understand with the &quot;languages do not matter&quot;&#x2F;&quot;frameworks do not matter&quot; is ultimately the following:

          What a good language or a good library (and to a lesser degree also a good framework) does is to pre-compress ideas into well understandable and composable chunks.

          Examples:

          `printf(&quot;foo %d, %3.2f %s&quot;, ...)` abstracts&#x2F;compresses a general strategy of shuffling bytes into the correct ascii&#x2F;utf-8... format. An LLM could also write the raw assembly or bytecode for doing the same thing, but for one it would take much more tokens and to apply this pre-invented concept, and second without the concept already invented there would be no &quot;information pattern&quot; in existence that the LLM could have learned or refer to.

          `list.map(...).filter(...)...` are patterns that (when applied strictly in a functional sense) go hand in hand with laws like `map` not affecting the number of elements, and filter producing no new elements etc... These are also patterns that are already invented and depending on the language these restrictions are checked. Just reading `map` somewhere can tell you (and the LLM) a lot, and writing `map` instead of while, for or jmp will capture and express much more information. LLMs would not have been able to learn these concepts if they did not already exist. And even if such a general pattern would be discovered by an LLM somewhere inside its learnt parameters, it would not haven given this pattern a name that it could&#x2F;would tell you. And if you do not know the name for such a concept how have a much harder time prompting the LLM.

          Expressing computations in a well understood algebra allows for symbolic manipulation and simplification. like `5 + 3 == 3 * 5 == (1+1+1) * 5 == (5+5+5)...`. But algebraic manipulation requires a symbolic language with precise rules to describe what manipulation is allowed. In AI-speak you could say the language itself is a harness or a sandbox to guide and restrict whats possible. Doing advanced math proofs is only possible for LLMs because languages like LEAN provide a strict guideline to build upon.

          In short, two extremes: If LEAN is so great at proofing correctness and LLMs are so good at LEAN, why is not from today on everything (windows, linux, basecamp, hey, gcc, rustc, blender...) translated into LEAN? Why bother with rust at all? On the other hand if languages do not matter anyway and LLMs are able to recognize all the pattern on their own, why not let the LLM output and iterate on the binary bytecode to generate a self contained binary directly?

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