There is a huge amount of hate on HN against Rails lately. Most of it amounts to the straw man attack of "Rails is bloated and old, Node/insert tiny framework here is where it's at".

I code with Rails. With Rails 3.2, I'm more productive than I've ever been. What others call "bloat", I call "features". It is surprisingly good having an out of the box asset pipeline for optimization of JS/CSS. The simplicity with which you can construct and adjust scoped queries with ActiveRecord is astounding. The ease of adding pre-baked authentication and authorization gems is great.

Seriously - screw writing a large data-driven web app in a tiny framework. You get so much for free in Rails.

Yes, Rails has some issues. It has a long initial load time. Ruby is not the fastest language. My main complaint about Rails at the moment would be that it moves too quickly - not that it moves too slow. If you're writing an app to service millions of users simultaneously (and not charging for it), the speed might be an issue. I haven't found it to be a problem in my company, where we charge money for what we write.

And on this change - I'm not fussed either way, but it's certainly good that Rails core mention this on the Rails blog so that Rails developers are aware of it well before 4.0 comes out. And standards compliance is a good enough reason for me.