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Comment by louiskottmann | Hacker News Reader

I've been a Rails DevOps and nowadays a web one-man-show with it for over 10 years and I'd do it again.

Not many frameworks have been thriving that long, and there's good reason.

It packs everything, is tidy and productive, with a pleasant language to read and write.

In the latest Stackoverflow survey, it's back at the "top 5 of desired stacks to use for next project" over a decade after its inception !

Give it a try.

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The "one-person framework" thing is a big draw. I'm amazed at how productive I was in it, and it's not just at the code level. Even though I've been doing sysadmin/devops/architect work for over 25 years now, it's just so damn nice now not to have to think about e.g. standing up a HA PostgreSQL cluster or Redis and deployment is largely a solved problem.

> not to have to think about e.g. standing up a HA PostgreSQL cluster or Redis

I don't understand...Rails does not replace a HA PostgreSQL cluster or Redis, they are orthogonal. Why would you not have to think about them?

And most folks getting stuff done with Rails ain't be filling out surveys to boost their stack - or maybe that's just me.

So everyone just stop worrying what everyone else thinks or seems to think and just use the right tools for you and get on with it

There are two types of devs: those that ship and those that fill out surveys (and not because their stacks are so much more efficient that they have time to fill out the surveys)

There are two types of dichotomy: those which are autoreferring and sound, those which are absurd, and those which are really going too far.

Over TWO decades! Rails has been around since 2004, making it just slightly younger than Django.

edit: Django was release in 2005

Rails is definitely older than Django. Django wasn’t released publicly until 2005.

Django had private use before then, but rails was also in private use before it was released.

Rails's public release was July 2004: https://rubytalk.org/t/ann-rails-0-5-0-the-end-of-vaporware/...

Django's was July 2005: https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2005/jul/15/chipy/

Adding Simon Willison's announcement: https://simonwillison.net/2005/Jul/17/django/

Thanks for the correction!

> In the latest Stackoverflow survey, it's back at the "top 5 of desired stacks to use for next project" over a decade after its inception !

Oh, where did you find that?

Only info I could find was that Rails is at rank 10 in the Web Frameworks category for Admired vs. Desired in the 2025 survey: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology/#2-web-frame....

Two decades. Rails was released in 2004, IIRC.

rails = ruby = oo/mutable && slow && resource hungry

And for a lot of folks that just doesn’t matter. Paying 50 or 100 USD for a server per month won’t be the thing that breaks you.

Before you get to a scale where Rails become a problem you need to have a product that drives a pretty significant engagement, that’s where most fail.

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