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Rails itself is only 19 years old. 15 years is too long to talk about what will or won’t exist with anything like a concrete prediction. At best you can say tha

Rails itself is only 19 years old. 15 years is too long to talk about what will or won’t exist with anything like a concrete prediction. At best you can say that legacy systems will still be around. If you’re a hobbyist and you tinker with your personal site or app once every couple of years and you want it to last indefinitely, just make it vanilla JS. For everyone else, it’s not a big deal to do a rewrite every five years as part of the normal maintenance cycle.

berkes 3y ago
> not a big deal to do a rewrite every five years as part of the normal maintenance cycle. I see that mind often and it makes me very sad. 40+ years of computer science, bookshelves, many now must-read classics, written on software maintenance, and this is what we end up with: just throw it out. I despise this mindset in other industries (electronics, phones, toys, furniture) where, instead of designing stuff to both last, and be repairable, we just buy a new couch, phone, or blender once anything breaks. And I dislike it even more in software. I honestly cannot, an will not accept the common statement by random web agency that rebuilding this bakeries WordPress site from scratch, is cheaper than salvaging and repairing it. Nor that rebuilding some Rails backend in Go, or Nest.js the easiest. I mean: I know it often is the cheapest or easiest. But only because those in charge of the previous version never bothered about maintainability.
- thunky 3y ago
  > I see that mind often and it makes me very sad It's not always a bad thing. It gives you the chance to do it better. When is the last time you looked at your work from 10 years ago and thought you'd do it exactly the same way today? And the cost to destroy and rebuild software is so much smaller than other industries that produce things that exist in the physical world. Why not take advantage of that? Also: job creation.
- earthboundkid 3y ago
  Read Programming as if People Mattered from 1991. Even back then frontend was a mess of spaghetti code that needed to be periodically tossed out. That’s just how frontend works. UI is ephemeral. The backend can be pure, crystal logic that lasts for decades or maybe centuries. The frontend is a rat’s nest of conditions that will get junked as soon as fashions change. It’s the difference between manufacturing denim and selling jeans. The denim business is forever. The jeans business is constantly changing.

berkes 3y ago

> not a big deal to do a rewrite every five years as part of the normal maintenance cycle. I see that mind often and it makes me very sad. 40+ years of computer science, bookshelves, many now must-read classics, written on software maintenance, and this is what we end up with: just throw it out. I despise this mindset in other industries (electronics, phones, toys, furniture) where, instead of designing stuff to both last, and be repairable, we just buy a new couch, phone, or blender once anything breaks. And I dislike it even more in software. I honestly cannot, an will not accept the common statement by random web agency that rebuilding this bakeries WordPress site from scratch, is cheaper than salvaging and repairing it. Nor that rebuilding some Rails backend in Go, or Nest.js the easiest. I mean: I know it often is the cheapest or easiest. But only because those in charge of the previous version never bothered about maintainability.

thunky 3y ago
> I see that mind often and it makes me very sad It's not always a bad thing. It gives you the chance to do it better. When is the last time you looked at your work from 10 years ago and thought you'd do it exactly the same way today? And the cost to destroy and rebuild software is so much smaller than other industries that produce things that exist in the physical world. Why not take advantage of that? Also: job creation.
earthboundkid 3y ago
Read Programming as if People Mattered from 1991. Even back then frontend was a mess of spaghetti code that needed to be periodically tossed out. That’s just how frontend works. UI is ephemeral. The backend can be pure, crystal logic that lasts for decades or maybe centuries. The frontend is a rat’s nest of conditions that will get junked as soon as fashions change. It’s the difference between manufacturing denim and selling jeans. The denim business is forever. The jeans business is constantly changing.