Is Rails Still Popular in 2018? | Hacker News Reader

Is Rails Still Popular in 2018?

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A bug problem I see with the methodology here is that _new_ SO questions aren't good measures of use - SO is very aggressive about duplicate questions, and for anything as popular as Rails the common questions have already been asked.

Anecdotally, my company uses Rails for new client projects all the time, so I don't think it has fallen as far as the author claims.

As someone who has done real work in a LOT of languages over the past 20 years, and has settled on Rails as my tool of choice for the past 10 years or so (when some requirement doesn't preclude it), what's the alternative? I really like ActiveRecord, how migrations are handled, the frightenly-expansive gem ecosystem, and how it allows for any front-end goodies you care to code. It's not like Rails has sat still either. I struggle to keep up with the new developments, and I'm making new apps with it every year. As a complete framework, what is Rails' competition?

One of the competitors in this area is Meteor[0]. I haven't used Django in many years, but that might also qualify

[0]: https://www.meteor.com/

Not OP, but I think he means frameworks using Ruby though, because I'm also in the same boat as him.

Hanami[0] is a nice contrast to Rails, although not nearly as mature yet.

[0] http://hanamirb.org/

There's lots of mature, successful sites using Rails. I'm a devops engineer for one, and although it's a magnet for technical debt, this firm has done a pretty good job of keeping it from getting out of hand.

why do you think it's a magnet for technical debt?

Yes. Many people dislike it for reasons of tech coolness. But it's a perfectly nice framework for quick app development. And the community support is amazing as well. The testing tools are good too.

So basically Rails is not as popular as it was before, but it seems to have influenced other successful frameworks.

They're using questions on stack overflow as a proxy for popularity. It's entirely possible that a decline in questions is due to a mature library of already answered questions on stack overflow, not a decrease in actual rails usage.

This was my thought as well. Generally when I have a question about rails, there are very few things that I cannot find an answer for now, compared to when I was working on it roughly some 12 years ago.

yeah absolutely but the author doesn't discuss why there was such a decline.

I'd think that part of the reason is people realised that Ruby is slow, and sometimes it matters.

Sure. But the man-hours required to build an app without the gems you would get for free on Rails is substantial; you would only want to do this if the app in question really calls for speed.

From time to time I get seduced by the romantic idea of building a simple JSON-spitting Go/C#/Java backend for an app, but then I realize that I would have to hand-code an enormous amount of functionality that I would get for free with Rails.

I don't know enough about rails to comment further, but aside from the fact it's from Microsoft, i'd think that maybe ASP.NET Web API would be a reasonable choice for simple REST Services? (downside is it only really deploys on Windows Server)

Yep. Also sometimes it's nice to have a language used for more than just the MVC app. Like the many many Python libraries. Or Javascript. And even further, sometimes these big fat MVC frameworks are just really not needed server side and folks are maybe wising up to that.

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