5 ms·

At this point in time, Rails is basically the reason I have a career, get paid, and provide for my family. Sure, any programmer could say that about any framewo

At this point in time, Rails is basically the reason I have a career, get paid, and provide for my family. Sure, any programmer could say that about any framework/language/platform they use regularly I suppose, but in fact Rails is the first platform I've been able to leverage to get great jobs and work with great people. Before that, various combinations of WordPress and homegrown PHP code were my bread-and-butter but I also did projects in Java, Python, and others. (I still shutter when I remember what I had to go through to work in Java...) I think the thing that was so amazing about Rails when it really got popular was that you could build almost any sort of web app you could imagine and everything would just make sense. The full-stack, the conventions, the fact it took much less time to get something working than its competitors...it was SO much easier to build stuff and stop reinventing the wheel. I can't tell you how many times in the PHP world I had to figure out how to write code to send hand-tuned SQL to the server just to do basic stuff. Obviously, these days you can do cool framework-y full-stack stuff in PHP as well, but in many respects that was a response to the rise of Rails. (Actually, I must admit, I built a PHP 5 framework somewhat inspired by Rails before I jumped onboard the bandwagon...what prompted that was Zend announcing their PHP 5 framework, at which point I figured I'd either drop my framework and go with Zend or...just go with Rails, learn Ruby, and stop fighting it. I'm so thankful I decided to do just that!) So thank you Ruby, and Rails on your 10-year birthday. You have made this programmer a happy man.

neduma 12y ago
>> any programmer could say that about any framework/language/platform they use regularly I suppose True. I know lot of guys made killing with Wordpress, Drupal, Perl, Java. Networking, etc., Career success is nothing to with any particular technology.
- joesb 12y ago
  I think it does. Some technology requires too much cost and opportunity to learn (SAP, and those costly IBM stuff). Some technology would never click with a person (I never click with J2EE despite being really proficient in Java, and I can't find the right way to work with Wordpress and version control).
diminish 12y ago
Rails has also been successful by absorbing or beating competing frameworks in Ruby, inspiring a lot of other languages to come up with similar frameworks...
- dmix 12y ago
  Javascript owes is a lot of its recent success to Rails. Backbone.js was seeded by the popularity of rails, which brought about Ember, Angular, and other JS MVC frameworks that are extremely popular today.
  - jonathanwallace 12y ago
    Not quite. Ember existed before backbone.js by about 2-3 years under the name sproutcore. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ember.js#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ember.js#History http://sproutcore.com/about/ http://sproutcore.com/about/ Backbone.js's first release was in 2010. http://backbonejs.org/#changelog http://backbonejs.org/#changelog
    - dmix 12y ago
      In the front-end world Sproutcore never made a huge splash and was not used by many companies outside of Apple. Sproutcore was frequenly blogged about and critically popular, but not used by a large amount of developers and companies in any way Backbone/Angular/Ember are... or even the way early versions of Rails were used. Backbone.js was the starting point of the huge JS MVC community that exists today. Primarily due to it's simplicity and Rails-esque nature, where as Sproutcore was unwieldily and enterprise-software-esque until work on Ember started. Rails had many early predecessors as well but Rails was the one that did it right, and spurred that style of framework's popularity.
      - jonathanwallace 12y ago
        Fair enough, I remember it that way too. I was only looking to clarify what I read in your original post as indicating that backbone.js was the first one. I agree with you that it was the first highly popular framework. Sorry for the earlier "well, actually." :)
justinzollars 12y ago
I also owe much of my professional success to rails dhh and so many others in our community. Convention over configuration is still a revolutionary concept. Thank you!
abvdasker 12y ago
Hear, hear!

neduma 12y ago

>> any programmer could say that about any framework/language/platform they use regularly I suppose True. I know lot of guys made killing with Wordpress, Drupal, Perl, Java. Networking, etc., Career success is nothing to with any particular technology.

joesb 12y ago
I think it does. Some technology requires too much cost and opportunity to learn (SAP, and those costly IBM stuff). Some technology would never click with a person (I never click with J2EE despite being really proficient in Java, and I can't find the right way to work with Wordpress and version control).

diminish 12y ago

Rails has also been successful by absorbing or beating competing frameworks in Ruby, inspiring a lot of other languages to come up with similar frameworks...

dmix 12y ago
Javascript owes is a lot of its recent success to Rails. Backbone.js was seeded by the popularity of rails, which brought about Ember, Angular, and other JS MVC frameworks that are extremely popular today.
- jonathanwallace 12y ago
  Not quite. Ember existed before backbone.js by about 2-3 years under the name sproutcore. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ember.js#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ember.js#History http://sproutcore.com/about/ http://sproutcore.com/about/ Backbone.js's first release was in 2010. http://backbonejs.org/#changelog http://backbonejs.org/#changelog
  - dmix 12y ago
    In the front-end world Sproutcore never made a huge splash and was not used by many companies outside of Apple. Sproutcore was frequenly blogged about and critically popular, but not used by a large amount of developers and companies in any way Backbone/Angular/Ember are... or even the way early versions of Rails were used. Backbone.js was the starting point of the huge JS MVC community that exists today. Primarily due to it's simplicity and Rails-esque nature, where as Sproutcore was unwieldily and enterprise-software-esque until work on Ember started. Rails had many early predecessors as well but Rails was the one that did it right, and spurred that style of framework's popularity.
    - jonathanwallace 12y ago
      Fair enough, I remember it that way too. I was only looking to clarify what I read in your original post as indicating that backbone.js was the first one. I agree with you that it was the first highly popular framework. Sorry for the earlier "well, actually." :)

justinzollars 12y ago

I also owe much of my professional success to rails dhh and so many others in our community. Convention over configuration is still a revolutionary concept. Thank you!

abvdasker 12y ago

Hear, hear!