Comment by jack_riminton

At others expense tbough? Is this the form of merriment we want? Gl;hf.

I think there’s two reasons for that:

1. When deploying a Rails app, the JS asset compilation is always the slowest part and is the most likely to break.

It doesn’t help that Rails has made a complete mess of JS assets, which I wrote about at https://fly.io/ruby-dispatch/making-sense-of-rails-assets/

2. For people who had to ship a Rails API + JS SPA, their workflow felt slow, brittle, and cumbersome. It wasn’t their imagination either—testing the stack required integration tests, which are always slow. Maintaining an HTTP API to talk to the SPA is additional effort that’s not needed, which Hotwired has demonstrated clearly.

I still think Rails has a lot of fuel left in its tank, thanks to Hotwired and the big companies behind it, but I agree the “Rails is the most productive framework” gets way overplayed. It was def “most productive” 18 years ago, but most other modern frameworks took notice, caught up, and have even surpassed Rails in a lot of ways.

The Ruby runtime leaves a lot to desire when you compare it to runtimes like Elixir/BEAM, Go, etc. I also think Rails has a terrible view layer, but most folks don’t quite understand that that means yet. This is something I’m working on at the moment.

The framework was first conceived 18 years ago, but continues to evolve. The framework has also changed significantly to deal with functionality that modern web applications need, in much the same way the Javascript community has evolved to better suit the needs of the modern web application.

It’s changing back. SPAs are on the way out. Check back in 5 or 10 years - Rails will still be here.

Probably DHH’s continued prominence in the community.

As someone who quite likes js & our wild teaming ecosystem a lot, I can also say: we definitely deserve some/mamy jokes too. No one's wrong on that. (jokes are good!)

I wish they felt like they had some punchlines though. No one ever bothers to make the JS world laugh along. We know it's wild here (Come play! So much fun freedom!). It comes off more like a beat down.

Context also matters. Conversationally Mike's words could be an amusing wink & grin quip. I can see that. On paper, & seeing it repeated with the same reckless unnuanced antipathy, it lacks the personal connection & feels indicative of a general attitude situation that is quite prevalent.

Again I think there's plenty of valid negativities in js, but looking at the distribution of where folks fall on the alignment chart when they talk about JS issues, it concerns me how lopsidedly & with what casual acceptance folks tend towards the scariest boxes of the chart. To me we are all in the challenge of making computing better together, & we can help ourselves by helping others.

See like, this isn't constructive maligning at all, it's more undirected blanket unniceness.

It costs nothing to actually put down a reason for being upset, versus having totally generic downputs. Very few things are truly rotten to the core, most bad things have some bad aspects but could be much better if ___. If something is rotten to the core the central articles of faith for why that's so should be declared.

Plenty of Ruby folks have gone on to do great friendly Rails ish JS works. Ember.js is very batteries included, tries to show that yes all the potential is there to pave a nice well integrated happy-path system. To assume misery seems unreasonable; many have done fine.

I think we have a real obligation to do better to ourselves & one another than to foster shallow prejudices. Trump in his April 11th Tucker Carlson interview was asked why he thought Dems weren't worried about nuclear weapons. "That's because they don't understand life. That's because they don't understand what it is that you have to understand." This is an irrefutable claim. There's no point to start discussing here, no possibility that the other side might change or have some nuances. Let's not do this. Let's rise to higher places where we take real appraising concerned looks at things, rather than just dismiss stuff out of hand. We don't even have to be nice, but let's at least strive to be somewhat useful.