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Rails is no different to any other modern programming language. It’s no more productive. I don’t know why people treat it like it’s more productive than other

Rails is no different to any other modern programming language. It’s no more productive. I don’t know why people treat it like it’s more productive than other things.

jstummbillig 2y ago
For starters, it's not a programming language, but assuming you are aware: The completeness of Rails still not that common (for example, NextJS needs a lot of additional packages for stuff that integrated in Rails). Curiously, what makes Rails more interesting to me right now are LLMs: Rails is so stable that you can trust the models to know about (most) features, which makes ai assisted development so much more effective.
vundercind 2y ago
Why was it ever popular? It promoted a productive code organizational pattern, basic hygiene like migrations that were absent in a lot of web dev at the time, had a very productive non-totally-dogshit ORM, and some good deployment tools for the pre-container (and, hell, pre-popularization-of-IAC) era developed alongside it. It’s mostly the ecosystem making it popular these days. Same reason Python’s a juggernaut in several spaces—the ecosystem, not the language or tools (or, in Rails’ case, framework). You can slap a few gems together and have a site with all the basics (user accounts, admin, OAuth, file uploads, user roles, et c) in minutes. The gems are widely-used enough that they support most things you might need for whatever-they-do, and you probably won’t run into some feature that you really need but has been broken for two years and nobody realized it because nobody’s using that feature. (For the record, I’ve sworn off rails after seeing so many codebases that were total dumpster fires that I decided it attracts too many budget-minded-to-a-fault companies and owners for me to want to work with it again, plus I fucking hate ungreppable magical defined-nowhere metaprogramming symbols and magical imports that leave one unable to figure out WTF is happening without running the code, but I can see why it’s popular)

Rails is no different to any other modern programming language. It’s no more productive. I don’t know why people treat it like it’s more productive than other things.

jstummbillig 2y ago

For starters, it's not a programming language, but assuming you are aware: The completeness of Rails still not that common (for example, NextJS needs a lot of additional packages for stuff that integrated in Rails). Curiously, what makes Rails more interesting to me right now are LLMs: Rails is so stable that you can trust the models to know about (most) features, which makes ai assisted development so much more effective.

vundercind 2y ago

Why was it ever popular? It promoted a productive code organizational pattern, basic hygiene like migrations that were absent in a lot of web dev at the time, had a very productive non-totally-dogshit ORM, and some good deployment tools for the pre-container (and, hell, pre-popularization-of-IAC) era developed alongside it. It’s mostly the ecosystem making it popular these days. Same reason Python’s a juggernaut in several spaces—the ecosystem, not the language or tools (or, in Rails’ case, framework). You can slap a few gems together and have a site with all the basics (user accounts, admin, OAuth, file uploads, user roles, et c) in minutes. The gems are widely-used enough that they support most things you might need for whatever-they-do, and you probably won’t run into some feature that you really need but has been broken for two years and nobody realized it because nobody’s using that feature. (For the record, I’ve sworn off rails after seeing so many codebases that were total dumpster fires that I decided it attracts too many budget-minded-to-a-fault companies and owners for me to want to work with it again, plus I fucking hate ungreppable magical defined-nowhere metaprogramming symbols and magical imports that leave one unable to figure out WTF is happening without running the code, but I can see why it’s popular)