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Comment by paozac | Hacker News Reader

I love rails and the recent improvements are great.

I have the impression, though, that these days it only appeals to those who picked it up before version 3 or 4, when it was smaller, maybe more understandable, and incredibly better than all the competing frameworks (except Django maybe).

If your first contact with rails is version 7+ and you’re only comfortable with JS/TS, then you’re not going to get it and might actually strongly dislike it

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I'd say that if you're first encounter with rails is version 8+ -- it's a lot easier to use than previous versions.

Partly because the handling of JavaScript is much less bespoke and complex.

Javascript handling in Rails was easy in the early versions, then became messy with the asset pipeline and webpacker, and is becoming simple again with the latest versions

I now also believe that at least Active Record is much easier to use than Django's ORM

Doesn't matter when devs just slop out 400 lines of SQL and bypass the ORM.

Frameworks and structure will save you from neither stupidity nor ignorance.

That has always been the case, why would it be different now? Easy to flag and spot in code review.

Boy, I sure wish I had the opportunity to review codebases before inheriting them for maintenance...

I get your point but this is neither a Rails, nor an AI problem and as old as time.

I mean, I've seen enough "django specialists" to end up with queries doing a dozen of join bombs and producing 10 million rows from dataset of maybe 1000 items. So pretty safe to add "ORM" to your last statement.

If have a different opinion on this, as I think it's 100x better to learn sql and just write it directly instead of using the dozens of leaky abstraction of some framework.

> If your first contact with rails is version 7+ and you’re only comfortable with JS/TS, then you’re not going to get it and might actually strongly dislike it

This is the primary issue with Rails in my experience. It takes intentional effort to internalize the idioms before it clicks and you unlock the magic that makes it so insanely productive. JS devs will keep trying to force backend business logic into Franken-React Stimulus components and complaining it's not very good.

Yes, I've seen that, too. The rails way of doing things can feel like a terrible limitation to some developers, while others enthusiastically embrace it

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