One of my goals for 2022 is to write my first real web app. I want to understand things like authentication, creating an API, and security. My initial impression is that the JS/Node world is miserable. Rails looks 1000 times more pleasant.
God, yes. Especially with Hotwire [1], which advertises being able to do modern web apps with a minimum of JS. I've played around with it, and for me it completely eliminates the need for AngularJS/React/whatever.
Strait up, use Rails with all the defaults (ImportMap, Hotwire) but use Postgres and maybe Tailwind (`rails new myapp --database=postgresql --css=tailwind`). No extra gems are needed really (if anything, they add more complexity as not all are updated to be compatible with Rails 7).
Regarding Django, my problem with it is that it is not a "full stack" framework anymore. Both Rails and Laravel provide a very good frontend solution. Rails with hotwire, etc and Laravel with livewire. Just the fact that django has no official way to compile/build assets, and the templating language is really arcane and limited for today's needs. Just compare that with Blade (Laravel's templates) which allow you to build components out of the box.
for authentication/authorization/security, it's great to learn by writing those from scratch, but unless you want that to be your career focus, you'd really be much better off to defer to battle-hardened libraries in those areas for any commercially-/publicly-oriented web app.
I’d recommend using rails without any front-end framework initially so you understand the HTTP calls going on. Just return HTML from your controllers (classes that run specific code when you hit an endpoint.) Build up from there and you’ll get the hang of it while understanding what’s happening underneath.
Unscientific poll with possibly a biased sample: more people find functional easier to work with. But telling, the difference is more pronounced among bootcampers and informally educated programmers than formally educated programmers https://twitter.com/DNAutics/status/1459348334007787526.
Not to mention that Elixir is basically "mostly functional but you don't have to faff around with monads or anything to do imperative".
"Most people are more comfortable with imperative languages"
Roll your own session management, auth, ORM, db migrations, html templating, CORS, cross site scripting protection, the list goes on and on.
With node projects they typically keep all of their dependency neatly under node_modules/ and you can clearly see how things are included and how things work.
Learning a language/runtime takes some effort but much less, IMHO, than learning a framework. Doesn't matter if that is Rails, Django, Ember, Angular, iOS SDK, Android SDK, React+Redux+???, and so on.