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Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

RoR is not out it just is not sexy anymore

Of course they ditch Ruby/RoR if their customers want to learn the tech that is in demand.

You seem to be agreeing with the article but disagreeing over phrasing?

Ruby and Rails aren't special anymore, there's lots of other languages which can do the same thing but have huge advantages. Then again, that was the case going back to 2007 (Pylons is but one example - the Rails template on a better VM and with more libraries available and none of the bloat and magic). Rails has always been about hype and that hype doesn't matter when other stacks have 10x the performance and are just as productive.

Brb, gonna go kill some zombie fcgi processes.

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RoR is special that it does one thing exceptionally well. And that is monolithic web applications. I do not know how you measure productivity no other stack comes close to RoR.

It really depends on what exactly you are doing. If you are churning out business-y apps pretty regularly Rails gems are really useful.

Otherwise, there's nothing there other stacks don't have. Scaffolding generation, validation, command line tools, good templating, routing, routing for apis, ORMs, etc, that stuff is built into almost any framework these days and if it isn't it is because you are using a microframework by choice. You have dozens of frameworks across various languages that approach the functionality of Rails.

Django is certainly very comparable, and a good Django dev can pump out apps as quickly as a Rails dev. Stacks in other languages are doing things Rails is incapable of and they have borrowed all of the benefits (because Rails does a lot of things right).

On the other hand, I'd say RoR optimizes productivity for Day 1 at the expense of Day 60+. I abandoned RoR because I didn't like that deal.

Thanks for the clarification! I interpreted Rails as 'Rails' not 'Rail's' and 'template' as a verb (sorry for the specifics, but I'm at a linguistics conference after all). I've been using Pyramid/Pylons recently and particularly happy with the experience so far. Not sure why it's not more popular, although it's also not particularly a bad thing this is the case.

Can you explain the arguments against Pyramid/Pylons?

It was a compliment. Pylons in 2007 was Ben Bangert and other Python devs who had been working the area since the late 90s with Zope and other projects sitting down and more or less porting the good parts of Rails to Python.

You had the same routing, you had very very fast templating in Mako, the best ORM in the business in SQLAlchemy, all of the tooling around Rails (scaffolding, testing, etc) and the best part of it was it was all designed to be easily swappable. Didn't like the files that were getting generated with your project? Tweak Paste. Different templating system? Few lines of code to be swapped out.

It was a very forward-thinking and well-designed framework at a time when the Python VM was much better than Ruby. Feature for feature it was better than Rails, it just wasn't as popular.

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