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Comment by frankjr | Hacker News Reader

I still believe Rails is one of the best and most productive web frameworks out there and using it for a new project is a no brainer. I hold no special love for Ruby but Rails feels more like a DSL for creating websites than anything else. Sure it's not the fastest stack out there but the vast majority of websites will never outgrown it.

I think a part of the reason why it has become "boring" is that everything's already there and so you don't read every week about a new shiny thing like in the good ol' RailCasts days.

https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/categories

http://railscasts.com

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Its kind of ironic that for folks like me that ran screaming away from Java/J2EE to Rails are now seeing questions that assert Ruby/Rails is the new "boring" when it used to be Java. I think this is speaking volumes about the maturity model of the stack and eco-system. For almost any web application you can't go wrong with Rails.

People will knock the performance almost out of habit but there are major internet scale applications out there running this stack. Its horizontally scalable like many other web stacks and I would put developer happiness and ease of use as more important than some theoretical spreadsheet benchmarks.

Many developers just get bored and want to play with something new and shiny. Our industry has spent countless hours reinventing the wheel. I'm not saying there should be one tech stack to rule them all, just that the time spent inventing new frameworks for Resume Driven Development is kinda ridiculous.

I agree, and will add that even though it might seem "boring" to some people, there are plenty of unique fun requirements per project even when using the same stack. 5 different clients have gotten me to start new projects in the past 3 years, and I chose Rails for all of them. Different business domains, different budgets for MVPs (4 figures to 6 figures), sometimes multiple developers and sometimes not, but in all cases we were able to ship product quickly without burning too much of the client's money. Contrast that with some bloated, slow dev on traditional SPA apps I saw during my last stint in enterprise, Rails enables us to move at lightning speed. Seriously, I saw people burn way more money for far less output! Maybe SPA wasn't the only problem and enterprise was, but the point is for that a lean MVP for a wide variety of domains, it's hard to beat Rails if you already know it.

I just watched the: http://railscasts.com/episodes/115-model-caching-revised

and still got some value out of it. Rails + Railscasts was truly a exceptional combination

Everything being a DSL is the worst part for me. Given Ruby's lack of static typing, every task becomes "how does this specific DSL work again...?". And when there's a problem it can be non-obvious how to figure out what you did wrong. That said, once you learn the DSL I can totally see how it makes you ultra-productive.

I've been playing around with Ktor lately, and while a lot of it still depends on DSL's, it feels less magical and more like regular code, and I can easily step into the types/source of each DSL.

Just replace 'DSL' with 'API' in your comment and it describes using any large software framework. When you use on a framework to multiply your effort, you inevitably have to learn the ins and outs of the framework. In Ruby/Rails this is accomplished with a lot of class methods, but in other languages you would just be doing the same thing with instance methods or whatever.

Correct, but the key part I mentioned was "Given Ruby's lack of static typing". It's nearly impossible to hunt down source code in large Ruby projects due to mix-ins, dynamically adding methods to types, etc. At least in Ktor I've reasonably able to track down the implementations of most DSLs I've come across since it's statically typed. I tried the same in Rails long ago and gave up.

> Everything being a DSL is the worst part for me.

This is the worst part for me. Even though I've been using Rails for years, I still stumble on this.

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