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Comment by ksajadi | Hacker News Reader

This is cute but fails to mention how many times in the life a rails application we have to go from bundler to webpacker to sporkets to Propshaft and importmaps to jsbundling. Or from autoloader to zeitwerk or from Turbo to Hotwire and god knows what else.

Take a look at ads on rails newsletters and how many of them are professional services to upgrade your rails app.

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I’m glad someone called this out. “Let’s just use vanilla rails” — sure, except basically every version of rails for the past 5 years has decided to completely change how they do JS.

So many gems are also still built on sprockets — even when you want to use the “rails” way, you are stuck now with a hodgepodge of JS anyways.

It’s a mess — maybe one day we’ll get it fixed, but don’t pretend it’s not partially rails fault as well.

Don’t forget Coffeescript. Just recently I worked at a company that was still postponing porting their Coffescript code, only new code was using Vue.

I really don't like Hotwire and FE history (I'm playing with htmx, Datastar, Phlex and love it) but the ActiveSupport autoloader -> to Zeitwerk migration was pretty much something in the background, an implementation detail, at least in my experience. Most devs don't even know what is all this about.

I’ve done all those updates at real companies with millions of users. They took from an afternoon to maybe a week of single dev time. If you keep your garden tended, weeding it becomes less of a chore.

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