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Comment by valenterry | Hacker News Reader

I think this is actually a very efficient way of programming. but it doesn't scale in project size and team size. Similar for Lisp. This is why these languages are really good for prototyping, but not as good anymore for big, longterm projects imho.

That's also why I don't think it's a great idea to add types etc. to programming languages like python or ruby. They are not made for this and they should focus on what they do well. Use the right tool for the job, don't try to make every tool being able to be used for the same task.

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This is just not true. There are several multi-Billion dollar public companies with millions of users and thousands of employees built on Rails.

In fact, the philosophy of convention over configuration et all makes Rails MORE scalable and easier to onboard new people than anything else out there that I’ve seen.

I agree, the convention means there are very straight-forwarded places to look for things

I recently worked on a Rails project for someone who didn't like to create scaffolds, models or controllers for small things, thinking that it would add to the bloat. But conceptually it makes everything 10x times easier and faster to find and understand

Well, you'd better not check what happened to all those Rails apps when those companies grew.

There are soooo many blogs about migrating away from Ruby, adopting Go, Scala, whatever statically typed thing.

There's a reason even Ruby is getting a proper static type system.

Um, really? Why are unicorns like Shopify or Github are still using Rails if that's the norm?

The same reason Facebook uses php: that's what they started with and it's prohibitively complex, expensive and risky to change at their scale.

Shopify is not a unicorn...sorry for nitpicking. Its a publicly traded company worth 210 billion dollars. It used to be a unicorn a long time ago.

Now that I think of it, are there any major startups launched post Rails glory days? Some time around and before Rails 4.0, so 2013.

Almost all the major former startups that I could find are from 2010 or earlier.

Depends on your definition of major. For a company to become a unicorn it usually takes 7 years (not sure on the number but it keeps changing). So many companies formed in 2015,16...+ aren't there still. Looking in Linkedin for Rails jobs there are a lot, not all of them are old companies. Gitlab is a very famous name(2014) but it too IPO'ed so it's not a startup anymore.

Gitlab definitely counts ;-)

RoR is the most popular choice with Y-Combinator companies.

Its productivity is simply hard to beat.

Most of these companies are unicorns or public. https://spreecommerce.org/ruby-on-rails-most-popular-among-t...

Dropbox literally hired Guido for a while and sponsored a performance oriented fork of Python.

I doubt they can be listed as a Rails success story.

I dont think Dropbox even use Ruby. They have been a Python shop since day one?

Stripe doesn't use Rails either. That was a pretty bad article. And it is somehow from Spree.

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