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Comment by VeejayRampay | Hacker News Reader

So basically Rails is not as popular as it was before, but it seems to have influenced other successful frameworks.

They're using questions on stack overflow as a proxy for popularity. It's entirely possible that a decline in questions is due to a mature library of already answered questions on stack overflow, not a decrease in actual rails usage.

This was my thought as well. Generally when I have a question about rails, there are very few things that I cannot find an answer for now, compared to when I was working on it roughly some 12 years ago.

yeah absolutely but the author doesn't discuss why there was such a decline.

I'd think that part of the reason is people realised that Ruby is slow, and sometimes it matters.

Sure. But the man-hours required to build an app without the gems you would get for free on Rails is substantial; you would only want to do this if the app in question really calls for speed.

From time to time I get seduced by the romantic idea of building a simple JSON-spitting Go/C#/Java backend for an app, but then I realize that I would have to hand-code an enormous amount of functionality that I would get for free with Rails.

I don't know enough about rails to comment further, but aside from the fact it's from Microsoft, i'd think that maybe ASP.NET Web API would be a reasonable choice for simple REST Services? (downside is it only really deploys on Windows Server)

Yep. Also sometimes it's nice to have a language used for more than just the MVC app. Like the many many Python libraries. Or Javascript. And even further, sometimes these big fat MVC frameworks are just really not needed server side and folks are maybe wising up to that.

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