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Comment by schneidmaster | Hacker News Reader

> * websockets & realtime stuff. (Rails 5 added that, i know, point still valid)

Seems a bit dismissive. It's not like Elixir/Phoenix have really been mature for all that long either. (Especially if your definition of "maturity" includes a broad selection of userland packages/gems.)

> * sort of "magic" that actually hurt developers

It's not just this comment, but I don't understand why "it's magic and that's bad" seems to have been accepted into the encyclopedia of Facts About Rails™. I still have yet to see a particularly good argument against CoC[1]; it boosts productivity and teaches developers to write concise, consistent, expressive code. All good things in my book.

[1]: http://rubyonrails.org/doctrine/#convention-over-configurati...

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Counterexample: just yesterday I spent nearly two hours trying to understand why a bunch of records was not being updated to database. Turns out that when attributes on already persisted records get assigned in particular sequence, ActiveRecord suddenly decides that there are no changes to be saved. Swap two calls, everything suddenly works. And there was nothing to help me to get to that solution, just groping in the dark and trusting my years of RoR development for a general direction.

Rails is great, and I've been productive in it for a long time. But the complexity (some would call it bloat) is real, and there are nasty edge cases. And when you stumble upon one, well, good luck.

I'd like to hear more about this. Is it possible you could share an example that demonstrates what you're talking about? Thanks.

That definitely sounds like it should be reported as a bug.

> "maturity"

maturity is many-dimensional here.

* userland packages - yes, sure. erlang/elixir ecostystem is not mature as of yet. It works, it nice, but you can't find everything you need (including e.g. blog posts and SO answers for every possible question).

* On other hand, erlang base brings stability, instruments to solve every possible _production_ issue out there.

* Phoenix itself is has same mixed aptitude - it's pretty new and, at same time, written by core rails dev and therefore has many design issues fixed from start.

> "it's magic and that's bad"

IMO it's not the magic that hurts but overtwisted internal logic where you can't figure out how it works exactly (and yes, Rails became pretty complicated software). Keeping things simple (at least "mental model" of things) is damn hard :( Phoenix is basically == "rewrite from scratch to reduce complexity and fix things that can't be fixed without starting from scratch"

> convention-over-configuration

i like that! Also, both Rails and Phoenix doing it right. 90+% other frameworks failing miserably :(

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