Well, I’m starting a company and our current prototype is Rails. I don’t regret my decision at all, although after spending the last four years writing exclusively Python it’s been a little jarring. The muscle memory is still there though and after two weeks I’m almost back to 100%.
I really missed Active Record and all of the conveniences there around migrations. When you’re prototyping and constantly evolving your data model - but still intend to throw real traffic at it - flexibility here with the hardened foundation of PostgreSQL is vital.
The framework and language aren’t red hot anymore but they are far from dead or even stagnant. There’s a tremendous amount of active development happening in Rails.
Meanwhile I’ve been learning Elixir via a course called “Elixir for Programmers” and love it a lot. I didn’t want to risk building things on Phoenix at this stage. It’s full featured and likely more than capable but the smaller ecosystem and it being a first production app for me wasn’t worth the risk. I’m dying to put the actor model and OTP to work in an environment where it would really shine.
Anyway... still loving Rails and Ruby! A lot! With SASS, Haml, rake tasks, lots of data fixture tools etc... and no BS with React and webpack, slow pipelines and maintaining two codebases for an API and a Frontend... you’re left with lots of functionality being built daily. It’s great.
Don’t get me wrong, React is awesome and it’s certainly the new foundation of UI development. But... the ecosystem is still learning to walk imho. Redux isn’t the answer. GraphQL is great on paper but the way people use it is not ideal (coupling data to ui). Long way to go before I’d go 100% JS.
This reminds me to book a ticket to rubyconf.