"all those abstractions and magic make you dumber" It was the opposite for me. I had been doing java and php web dev for a few years before rails was created.

"all those abstractions and magic make you dumber" It was the opposite for me. I had been doing java and php web dev for a few years before rails was created. The first time I used rails (before the 1.0 release), all those abstractions were a revelation. I realized, oh, I've never seen software structured this well before, and it immediately expanded my understanding of how code should be structured. "the monolithic approach is so 2005 and I realize nowadays that I just want to start quickly something without an ORM, Coffee, etc. and decide later if I add those amenities" Software isn't fashion. First, in rails you can start quickly and not use an ORM or coffee. I've written a whole lot of web apps in ruby over the years. Many in rails and many in sinatra. In my experience, most of the times I used sinatra I eventually wished I had just used rails because I nearly always wanted many of the rails features over time and putting all the pieces together myself was not the best use of my time. There has only been one case where a rails app I wrote should have been a sinatra app.