There was a post last week about the best programming language for LLMs, and in the comments people loved Go, with the claim being it's very opinionated and there's really only one way of doing things. I'd say the same is mostly true for Rails apps as well.
However having worked with Typescript for 8 years now... I'm not sure I could go back to Ruby without types. For LLMs thats important as well, the more guard rails you can give them the better. What's the state of type checkers today?
> However having worked with Typescript for 8 years now... I'm not sure I could go back to Ruby without types.
Very true for me as well. I've never worked with Ruby but feel the same way about Django.
Btw, if you're looking for a "Rails but with TypeScript," my colleagues and I are working on almost just that: https://wasp.sh/.
The main difference, besides the ecosystem, is that we're more in the "configuration over convention" camp. Wasp has a simple DSL for specifying said configuration, but it's about to be replaced with a TypeScript file.
Wasp is still in beta and nowhere near Rails-level polish. But, depending on your early adopter tendencies, you might find it interesting regardless. If you do try it out, please reach out and share your thoughts.
TS is very AI native to the point i'd agree it's near magical in terms of contract.
However, the fact its still the js ecosystem with react, thing is even though it's super productive in churning out the code, there's too many possible ways to do something. it's unwieldy.
For example Claude is obsessed with making react context providers. it'll make tons of them to power every feature. and your app will happily hold 20 layers of russian doll'd state in memory with no way to link to anything.
you have to tell it, no don't do that. i need you to power this thing through the router, through the url. and that has to be designed cohesively. and that's very different from the context free-for-all.
> TS is very AI-native, to the point I'd agree it's near magical in terms of contracts.
I agree.
Not only that, I feel like TypeScript is currently the only popular high-level language with a type system capable of communicating all meaningful information. It seems to have hit an LLM sweet spot.
Looking at other candidates:
- Rust is popular and has a powerful type system, but it forces you to program at a level that's lower than necessary for most projects, hindering usability.
- Go is much more usable and very popular, but its type system can't communicate much.
- Haskell has an excellent type system, but it's nowhere near popular enough, and its usability suffers due to esoteric constraints (laziness, purity).
- etc.
I don't know the recent developments in Python's and Ruby's type systems. They may be able to compete these days, but they were nowhere near TS's level in terms of contract a few years ago when I last tried them out.
And I admittedly have no idea what's going on with C# and Java, but I'd love to hear about it.
Ruby has types with RBS and Steep now. It's a lot like using .d.ts sidecar files alongside JavaScript, via jsconfig.json configuring tsc. I like it a lot!
However having worked with Typescript for 8 years now... I'm not sure I could go back to Ruby without types. For LLMs thats important as well, the more guard rails you can give them the better. What's the state of type checkers today?