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Comment by meerita | Hacker News Reader

Every piece of software has an expiration date. You can extend its lifespan, but technology keeps moving. What was considered standard on the backend five years ago may look completely different today. I think that's a good thing. Rails worked extremely well for its time, especially around 2007–2015, but it started to show its age as newer, more capable languages and runtimes matured.

We should be celebrating the fact that we can now port almost anything with far less effort, or modernize an existing stack to meet today's performance expectations, requirements, and engineering standards.

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Whats the expiration date on, say, the windows 95 version of paint? Because it still loads just fine on my current windows computer, does everything I'd expect from a paint program, and gets out of the way when I don't need it anymore

I don't know the expiration date of all software, I only know all software has some expiration date. Maybe that version you're using will not be usable in the next 5 years, and it will prove my point. That doesn't mean you cannot use it anymore, it means better options took over.

I don't think OPs comment was meant to be taken literally word for word. Breaking down language this way is hardly a productive way to discuss. OP is saying that most software has an expiry date, is this even controversial? All active software companies are constantly rewriting their stuff and would love to move to a more optimized stack, if cost of porting is not a factor.

>Whats the expiration date on, say, the windows 95 version of paint? Because it still loads just fine on my current windows computer,

When people say software is "expired", "obsolete", "legacy", "limited shelf life", etc ... they're not talking about whether somebody somewhere in the world has the ability or idiosyncratic desire to continue running that old software.

Instead, it means the software's ability to be practical and usable in relation to the rest of the current computing ecosystem. E.g. In this perspective, Win95 MSPAINT is "expired/obsolete" because it can't open .PNG and .JPEG files. In today's world, .PNG/.JPEG files are much more common than the .BMP files that MSPAINT 95 can open.

I still have an old 16-bit Microsoft C/C++ v 7.0 compiler from 1992. Did it expire?!? Well, not literally. There's no ticking time bomb in it that checks the system clock and refuses to run. Instead, the issue is that it doesn't have the newer C99/C++98/C++11 features and I can't use it to compile today's ffmpeg source code. That's what people mean by "expired/obsolete".

How does one run Windows 95 Paint in 2026? Are there people who earnestly use old school Windows tools?

Find the exe online, double click to run, ignore the warning about registry keys which might just be because I'm on a work computer

Windows 95 paint doesn't support PNG files

What are the newer more modern frameworks? How are they better than Rails?

Well, you have these:

- Rust: Axum, Actix Web

- Go: net/http + Chi, Echo

- C#: ASP.NET Core

- Java/Kotlin: Spring Boot 4, Quarkus

- Elixir: Phoenix

- TypeScript: Fastify, NestJS

- Python: FastAPI, Django

But they fill different niches, there's no way I'm going to choose Rust+Axum as much as I love Rust for an ecommerce/CRUD vs something as batteries-included and expressive like Rails or Django.

Sorry, but I need to know what makes Rust+Axum non-niche for ecommerce/CRUD.

Fragile boilerplate.

I love "Zero to Production in Rust", but that's a pretty long book that recreates a fraction of what comes out of the box with Django. Also, when things come with Django, there's no need to maintain or worry about subtle yet crucial bugs.

There are some baffling picks here. Several of these are super barebones minimal frameworks that doesn't have even a faction of Rails capabilities.

And yet people build sophisticated apps with them anyway, because there are plenty of components you can bring in piecemeal in any language ecosystem. You can even do this in Ruby without Rails.

By way of example, "react doesn't have a router" hasn't stopped it from becoming the dominant frontend framework.

I think a lot of commenters here have no idea what Rails actually is, what it solves for, or why its good.

Their perspective is "Rails? Isn't that like, super old??"

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