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Comment by mehphp | Hacker News Reader

I tried (am trying at current company) and still don't like it. I completely see the appeal for getting an idea up and running quickly, it absolutely delivers on that.

However, I joined a rails company about a year ago and the codebase is just a mess at this scale. I find it annoying that in order to know where dependencies are coming from, I can't just go to the top of the file and see what's imported. I have to know how rails injects it and then track it down from there.

Don't get me wrong, there are issues with django, Go, etc.. but for the most part I can jump in and track down what's happening much easier.

Now, Ruby itself isn't bad at all.

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Yeah, that's gotta be one of my biggest complaints after years of working with Rails. Eventually you sort-of memorize the conventions and can relatively accurately guess where a file lives, until someone decides to get clever and put things in a weird place.

It also implicitly discourages you from asking yourself if you should be accessing the thing you are. IMO a lot of the tight coupling in Rails codebases begins with being able to grab literally anything and use it with no one the wiser unless the read that specific line of code.

I love Ruby. Have used it for 15 years, but I can't stand Rails. It's just massive overkill for most things.

I prefer to start with Sinatra + Sequel for web projects. Sometimes Padrino + Sequel. As your project grows, sure, you'll pull in many things similar to Rails, and probably pull in some projects that started out with Rails too, but it allows you to be much explicit about which dependencies you pull in, why, and to limited where it gets pulled in.

I have not tried Sinatra, only heard good things about it I will check it out. Thanks!

Sinatra is great - it's small enough to read the whole thing and understand it. But it's also very minimalist, so you might also want to look at Padrino, which layers neatly on top of Sinatra, yet is still small and ORM agnostic.

It's also fairly painless to start with Sinatra, and layer in components from Padrino if/when you need them. E.g. you can simply register Padrino's helpers, mailer, routing, rendering or cache components in a Sinatra app if/when you need them. They're just straightforward Sinatra plugins.

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