I think Rails is great, work in it full-time, and would by default choose it for any web app I built, without some compelling reason to choose something else. B

I think Rails is great, work in it full-time, and would by default choose it for any web app I built, without some compelling reason to choose something else. But the points in that post are at least mostly true. Ruby certainly isn't the fastest language around. I've found it fast enough for most purposes though. I don't think there's a real noticeable difference from other interpreted languages for most applications. Our teams don't find it complex at all to build or host or set up dev environments for. No more so than other languages at least. I do recommend using CLI debuggers like byebug instead of VS Code or Rubymine, their GUI debuggers always seem to be a PITA to set up and keep running. CLI is definitely the preferred environment in Rails land. I'd describe Rails as highly opinionated. It's baked-in opinions about most things are mostly high-quality, though not perfect for everything. If you go along with it, you can get a lot of stuff done fast. If you're determined to do things some other way, you may have a rough time. IMO, if you just want to get a webapp going and don't want to think too much about architecture, it's better to just do things the Rails way. There's decent options to refactor later if needed. Ruby is an extremely dynamic and flexible language. This is both good and bad. Good in that you can do whatever crazy thing you end up needing to do in it. Bad in that if you end up with a codebase with 20 crazy things done, it can get awful hard to figure out what the heck your code is doing, where functions are defined, etc. There's a ton of Gems around that add various helpful features to Rails. My impression is the ecosystem has gotten much better in the last 5-10 years as far as popular mainstream Gems not doing crazy things with Ruby that make apps a huge pain to debug, but YMMV. I do think ActiveRecord is the best ORM out there. It is also highly opinionated though - it's gonna be messy if you don't name your tables and columns in the patterns that it likes. It does mostly give you clear and efficient SQL for most situations, and make it straightforward to drop down to raw SQL when it's needed. The lack of type-checking does mean that you'll want to write a lot of specs and run them often, since it's the only way to ensure your app keeps working. I used to kind of poo-poo thorough testing, but I've been bitten by really simple bugs making it through code review and initial deployment too many times.