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I’ll say this: I came to Rails from Node (and before that .NET but with a way smaller scope of responsibility), and I am thoroughly convinced the author is correct. I couldn’t estimate for shit in my first few months at this job (once I had ramped) because Rails makes things that would’ve taken at least twice as long easy to do, even without gems. Plus, I have seen not even a third of the compatibility issues between our version of the framework (bit old) and up-to-date games as I saw when I was writing Node full time. Rails is the first non-“enterprise” framework I’ve felt let’s me focus on the correct level of concern for my current needs.

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I believe Shopify is built on Rails and is (or was) a Rails monolith. It's worked well for them.

Shopify, Github, Gitlab are all built on rails. Even Twitter was on rails in its early days.

Twitter is more of a counterexample I think

Twitter using Rails to grow to the point where Rails became the problem was actually Rails's selling point. If you ever grow to the point where Rails is your problem, then you have money to solve that problem. But if Twitter hasn't used Rails, they might not event get to the point where their product is out the door.

It's absolutely correct to say Twitter blamed their issues on Rails. It's less likely to be correct that they wouldn't need a similar major change if they had started with anything else and grew from an MVP to one of the busiest sites in the world. I personally find it doubtful that they couldn't have done it with Rails.

GitLab rewrote some parts in Go, because Ruby was too slow on a big scale.

So “use rails until you raise a C round?” heh

if that was a pun on the C language, then I officially groan

I'd say it's more use Rails for all of your standard CRUD operations and then use Go as a module in Rails using Quartz/FFI if you have any algorithms that need to be high performance. Of course you could always go down the microservice route and spin up a Python/Go service for your more intensive data processing modules.

Exactly, we use Rails for most of the functionality and Go for the functionality that gets used most.

Start with Rails and optimize in Go for the services that get expensive to run in Rails, like https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly

I don't have any serious comment, but love "gitaly" as a project name.

Airbnb, Kickstarter, Twitch, GoodReads, Bloomberg, there is quite a list of companies who still run a significant amount of their site through Rails. Over time I imagine that particular bottlenecks and performance critical pieces have been pulled out into other languages and services as necessary, but I certainly wouldn't feel bad about it if I was developing or maintaing a Rails site today. It's significantly better than PHP, and a hell of a lot of sites are still run on that. The reality is that if you really need to scale, your primary bottleneck will probably be the datastore, not the frontend.

Stripe too

Here are two of the most popular books on Rails on Amazon, along with their page counts:

"The Rails 5 Way" (1088 pages)

"Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Web Development with Rail" (816 pages)

Rails is enterprise.

What does this enterprise slur even mean? Is it like saying a band sold out when they had a hit record?

Do we only use undiscovered indie frameworks now?

It means it's everything but the kitchen sink: heavyweight, difficult to learn and use, and full of features you don't need.

It has nothing to do with popularity being bad. In general that's good a thing, because support is better (and rails does have terrific support), but it does exert a feature-accretion force.

I didn’t mean it as a slur! When I wrote .NET, the applications I was working in were massively large and complex, and so mostly what I was working on was optimizing small bits and pieces, and they allowed me to focus ON optimizing those small bits and pieces, because they were what mattered in that context. Rails let’s me focus on the big picture, because that’s what matters in my current context. Express had me working on stuff that I didn’t REALLY care about/want to know about in the context I was in.

Have you ever used rails? It's not heavy or difficult to learn. Many commonly used things are actually separate gems, not included in the core framework.

My personal guess on this enterprise would be things like Spring or .Net where everything has an interface instead of just do things like Rails.

Long time rails developer turned "enterprise". Spring-cloud now requires much less boilerplate and is easy to develop with using kotlin's syntactic sugar shortening code and making it more concise.

Orm is kind of a failure and requires us to write some queries by hand into string literals, but at least it has it's own sql syntax to avoid engine dependence.

Spring Boot is so amazing. I don't feel like any of it is boiler plate at all.

I used to think SpringBoot was amazing until I tried Rails. Then I really felt another level of holy shit.

I have lots of love for both. They're different tools. Ultimately I dropped Rails because being without static typing just isn't for me, but certain parts of the experience were positively magical.

I sort of feel the same way about Boot. That auto configuration mechanism is next level. The breadth and depth of what's available in the Spring ecosystem is great too.

They're really kind of optimized for different things though. Like Rails has some gems you just drop in and it blows you away what you get for stunningly little effort. But then it's not that customizable and you find yourself fighting with it. Spring has all kinds of battle tested enterprise grade bits and bobs that take a lot longer to operationalize but they'll last you forever.

I'm currently trying out aspnetboilerplate as a middle ground between the two. Specifically the aspnetzero version. It's like that "holy shit I get all this out of the box?" with Rails but the "I can understand this, work with it, customize it if I need to and it's going to last the distance". Im finding there is a slight learning curve to it and I wouldn't necessarily make all the same choices the framework does, but so far I can see this becoming a happy medium once I've found my groove with it.

Much less? I haven't use spring cloud for quite a while but last time I did it there's quite some grunt work to make config server / eureka / ribbon / hystrix and friends to work. Let alone the the deployment process.

But I think the key difference is Rails is more opinionated so you don't have to worry about which circuit breaker to use. Or just don't use any.

You are typing about activating the service discovery modules of spring cloud (which rails doesn't have), I am typing about the autoconfiguration goodness. Sure, I could have said spring boot instead of cloud, but cloud is kind of a superset and comes with feign integration so I use that.

And yet I regularly see "fluent programming" levels of verbosity in the Spring-everything Java services and batch process code at my company. variableNamesThatLookLikeThis and tests.givenSome(data).thatLook(likeThis) seems to be something I only ever see in Java code bases. There's a love of unnecessary verbosity in that ecosystem.

When I started, Java and Spring were (still are..) enterprise (Ruby and Rails existed but were not popular in my area and network) and the major criticism in my mind was the difficulty faced as a beginner.

Spring was humongous and had so many modules that I just couldn't grasp the purpose of each (I still don't) plus there was a lot of overlapping functionality. Senior devs would come to college and ramble out stuff which made less and less sense as time passed by.

Writing a simple app became tedious without a reference by side. So that was enterprise in my mind - tedious, complicated and completely incoherent at times - what and why were completely skipped, at times, in favour of how.

At that time I discovered JS and the simplicity of assembling a decent sized app won me over. The startup ecosystem was also picking up pace in my country and speed of iteration mattered more than anything else. Granted JS can become a nightmare (which I learned later) but that speedy feedback compared to Java was enough to make node my "homestack."

There were other things which worked strongly against Java in my education - 1. Being forced to use eclipse without training (what are these buttons, what does everything do, how do i do this, I was fighting more against the IDE than anything else)

2. Being forced to use the Oracle database which was (for some xyz reason) given to us in a virtual machine and took ages to run a simple join in a small table of 100-500 records.

3. Programmers with experience can be completely oblivious to the mental model of a beginner.

All of this just soured me on "enterprise."

"what and why were completely skipped, at times, in favour of how."

This is a great summary of much of the frustration of using Spring.

Confirmed, Chicago has multiple billion and hundred-million-dollar businesses built on Ruby on Rails. A lot of it stems from Basecamp being based here, so Chicago had a lot of early adopters. But those early adopters have spawned new companies using the latest versions of Rails decades later.

That may have been intended as hyperbole, but Rails is only 15 years old...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_on_Rails#History

Yes, slight hyperbole in that it was >10 years off the top of my head. Your statement is correct.

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