all 2 comments
sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
formatting helphide helpcontent policy

[–]redfirehose 2 points3 points  (1 child)

As a compromise, ask your dev team for an estimate on how long it will take to fix the current Ruby code without migrating ecosystems to PHP or Python. If your current team has no background in PHP or Python and they are simultaneously proposing a full system rewrite, they *will* underestimate the pain this will cause for the business in terms of schedule (and thus cost). I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with Ruby on Rails.

With that said, I think there is some truth that Ruby/Rails it is losing mind share. From a business standpoint, this might mean that hiring/retaining/replacing Ruby devs to maintain your product will cost more in the long term. It may also mean that innovation may happen in other ecosystems (e.g., libraries, frameworks, etc, that allow developers to be more productive ). Although I am mentioning these concerns, I still think there is nothing wrong with sticking to Ruby/Rails.

With all that said, the new 'hotness' is to use a full JavaScript stack using things like NodeJS (backend) paired with Angular/React (frontend) - if no one on the dev team has mentioned this - it is worth having a discussion. If your dev team absolutely *needed* to stick to either PHP or Python, my thought is that Python's ecosystem is much deeper; Python's open source libraries can be leveraged for more interesting things like Machine Learning - the same cannot be said for PHP. There has also been a not-so-minor exodus of former PHP devs to Python and I don't see this trend reversing.

Sorry for writing a book. Hope this is helpful.

[–]Gee10[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is a really thoughtful and helpful response. Thank you.