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Comment by Murkin | Hacker News Reader

Can you perhaps point me to one of those $400K Ruby jobs ?

Kidding aside, he wanted something with a strong existing application / infrastructure base.

And while CLisp, Closure, etc are fun, we can all agree that starting 99% of web projects in them is probably a bad choice.

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Maybe Murkin, but Ruby was a bad choice. It's all what you build on it, and part of the fun might just be building and understanding things better than just doing "require 'i18n'".

Ruby is an amazing language, I love it, but so many things have been solved already it feels like it is a game of pick the package, rather than actual fun, at least in web development.

I felt the same way when I tried to start a "real" web project in a different language, and I got back to Ruby because I was more interested in implementing my own ideas rather than re-implementing existing solutions.

It means you should try to understand the libraries you're using instead of arbitrarily picking packages. Devise (https://github.com/plataformatec/devise) is a great example of that as they explicitly tell people not to use it unless they have a good understanding of the Rails framework.

In our startup we choose Ruby&Rails, might not be the most fun language and framework. But the #1 priority of our dev team, is to build the product - fast/simple/modifiable.

Same goes for Python&Django.

I personally believe in to choosing the best tool for the job - not the most fun/esoteric/interesting/etc one.

I'm a little bit surprised that Ruby and Rails are considered no longer fun.

What's fun these days? LISP and JS?

Might be a good way to know if you're doing something boring if you're just playing the pick-the-package game. If what you're doing is less interesting than re-implementing all those packages, then it might not be worth doing.

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