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Comment by makeitsuckless | Hacker News Reader

> Startups and other more established companies still choose Rails as their platform

As far as I can tell, this process has come to a grinding halt in the past few years.

I certainly see established companies ditching Ruby, not so much because of the language or framework itself, but because of the community that only seems to be able to solve problems "the Rails way", even if that's far from the most appropriate architectural solution.

It's shocking how many Ruby developers are architecturally ignorant about anything not applied by Rails, and it's biting many companies in the ass.

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Frankly, I'm surprised anyone would still make comments like yours after all these years. Comments like this probably peaked in 2008-2009 ("Rails can't scale" was even earlier) after the zed shaw article and there was a bunch of hype about everyone supposedly moving to Django and how Rails was supposedly dead, yet that didn't happen then, or any of the other times.

The reality is that lots of companies have been and continue to be created around Rails applications. An AngelList job search focused on server-side technologies currently returns 1267 startup results for "rails" while "node.js" returns 832, "node" returns 854, "django" 434, "python" 1461, "flask" 69, "go" 441, "php" 1192, and "Java" 3163.

JavaScript has become bigger, and it hasn't killed Rails on the server. Java remains huge, and it hasn't killed Rails. Python, Django, and Rails have roughly the same relationship as they did back in 2009.

A lot of very smart people who have extensive experience with many technologies choose Rails for new projects for very good reasons, this has been the case for the 10 years people like you have been making the same FUD-filled comments, and it will likely continue to the be the case for some time.

PHP -> Rails -> Node

That's what everyone predicted half a decade ago, yet it hasn't happened, not even the PHP death part. The relationships between these technologies have not really changed dramatically for the past 10 years. For example:

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=php%2C+javascript%2C+ruby%...

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=php%2C+node.js%2C+ruby%2C+...

I'm on board with this kind of thinking.

Despite languages and the FLOSS projects around them being passions and/or hobbies for so many professionals, at the end of the day I kind of need to get paid for knowledge and opinion. This also sort of requires that individuals and organizations who employe people for their opinion/expertise give two shits about, for example, Elixir.

As long as there are (tens of?) thousands of new job postings for Rails every month I think that indicates devs who prefer Ruby aren't "biting asses", and that companies aren't passing over Ruby/Rails.

>> That's what everyone predicted half a decade ago, yet it hasn't happened, not even the PHP death part.

Indeed. I don't think it will happen...at least not the way people are predicting it to happen. There are plenty of dev jobs that ultimately, you can pick any of the mentioned technologies and if it makes you happy, you'll find a job that will allow you to apply that skill while paying you a great salary (or hourly fee).

These debates are good fun for sure, but ultimately, it doesn't matter in most cases.

As a brand new Rails developer/web developer altogether, I'm an outsider looking. But it feels to me the chants of "Rails is doomed" mirror that of "PHP is doomed". Yet as you state (and show in your links) PHP is still very healthy and nowhere near death. Sure it might not be the hottest thing on the block, but really JS won't remain the hottest thing on the block in 20 years either, but JS won't die. Neither will Rails. Rails might not the new scorching hotness that it was in 2006, but it's still plenty hot. Rails has quite a bit of life left in it.

> It's shocking how many Ruby developers are architecturally ignorant about anything not applied by Rails, and it's biting many companies in the ass.

On the contrary, I started in web development by learning Rails, and it's simple, streamlined way of responding to an HTTP request has allowed me to pick up other architectures quite quickly. By being so simple, it gives me an easy point of comparison, and then I can appreciate other architectures differences.

> this process has come to a grinding halt in the past few years.

No it has not. In fact there has been more elaborate work done inside of rails (and django/python) than ever before.

Actually 'Rails is dying' rant has been going on for years! Almost like cold war propaganda. The only thing that will cease to exist is the war.

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