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I think the biggest difference for me is that when there's a rat's nest of a Rails application, refactoring it becomes the hell of type errors and writing tests that, frankly, a compiler would catch.

And with sufficiently large applications, those issues really start to spread through the whole program - or can.

addendum: I'd love to know why I'm getting downvoted here. I definitely speak from experience, here.

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I guess my point was that, with discipline, it's not a foregone conclusion that a Rails app is going to be a rats nest. The lows can be pretty low for sure. But it's one of the tradeoffs for the framework and one that can be mitigated with thought and effort.

This is my experience as well. Rails makes it incredibly easy to get a web app off the ground but as it grows and adds more features and complex business logic it becomes much more difficult to maintain than a codebase with static type checking.

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