Moving Beyond Ruby

I’ve been a Ruby developer for the last 4 years of my career. It’s served me very well, I still like it, and I expect that I’ll still be writing it for my career for years to come. However, there are some things that Ruby (and Rails) don’t do so well out of the box, and these things are causing me to look elsewhere.

• Concurrency. Ruby wasn’t built for concurrency, and therefore there is no consensus on how to do it.
• Scalability. It is genuinely hard to scale Rails applications out of the box. In fact, the box should be labeled “Scalability not included.” Much of this has to do with Ruby’s concurrency support and slow execution speed.
• Portability. Anyone who has set up a machine for Ruby development can attest to the difficulty of getting up and running. Setting up your production servers to run it can also be a pain. (Unless you get to use Heroku)

I recognize that there are solutions to all of these problems. However, I would prefer to be able to write in a language and framework that does a better job of these things out of the box.

Going Functional

As a programming teacher, I’ve seen first hand how students struggle with the concept of “Objects” and “Instances.” Many of us were taught that Object-Oriented Programming is easier to learn, yet these students have a hard time getting their minds around it.

This got me thinking, is Object-Oriented Programming really simpler than Functional Programming? My working theory is no, it isn’t. Programming really has to do with transforming data from one state into another state, and this fits very well into the functional paradigm of immutable state, first-class functions, and function chaining.

In contrast, Objects obscure what’s really going on. Since computers aren’t like people, imposing this anthropomorphic system on top of what the computer does actually makes things more complex.

Theoretically then, we should be able to compose programs that are both simpler and easier to understand with just the simple building blocks that Functional Programming languages give us.

Elixir

To test this theory, I’ve started learning Elixir. There are, of course, other functional languages I could learn, but Elixir seems like the easiest to pick up because it superficially looks like Ruby.

See for yourself:

Ruby

class PagesController < ApplicationController

  def index
    @title = params[:title]
    @members = [
      {name: "Chris McCord"},
      {name: "Matt Sears"},
      {name: "David Stump"},
      {name: "Ricardo Thompson"}
    ]
    render "index"
  end
end

Elixir

```elixir defmodule Benchmarker.Controllers.Pages do use Phoenix.Controller

def index(conn, %{“title” => title}) do render conn, “index”, title: title, members: [ %{name: “Chris McCord”}, %{name: “Matt Sears”}, %{name: “David Stump”}, %{name: “Ricardo Thompson”} ] end end ````

Elixir runs on the Erlang VM, which is battle tested and has excellent support for concurrency. Also, it has support for unikernels, something I’m interested in from a security perspective.

I intend to post more about my experiences with Elixir, so stay tuned. In the future, I also intend to take a look at Rust and Go.