Comment by gleenn
6 days ago
Strongly disagree. I've seen bad code or maintenance in all the languages. Sure, some ecosystems seem to attract worse practices, but the absolute best software engineering principles I ever learned in my multi-decade career were at a Rails shop. Everything was extremely well maintained, tested, CI/CD were great even before that was a thing. Not to start flame wars about refactoring or what it means to maintain code more, but that place was absolutely full of people who cared and kept those projects at the highest of caliber grade. You can find good, bad, and ugly in every ecosystem but I personally don't think Rails was ever even remotely bad. You can have an amazingly well-maintained setup and still be super productive. It's really about the people and the company spending the time, money, and energy to care. (Edit: typo)
Which shop? When? Who with?
It matters, far more in this ecosystem than others. If today there seems to be a history of pervasive testing culture in the Rails ecosystem, I can only assume there must exist some quiet mutual agreement to keep some history swept under what must be quite a large rug. Oh, I remember the same enormous amount of lip service about testing that you do! And I also remember what it was like to try to integrate a dependency into a Rails project in 2012, because that was a fair bit of what swore me off the platform. Rails was famously the home of dogshit engineering practice in its day, every bit as much as PHP, excepting only among the coterie of too-good-for-finance Boston hipsters who invented the thing, and benefited from all the same traditional software engineering training and practice they built a culture (and, coincidentally, a reputedly quite lucrative consulting practice) around decrying. Just saying "I saw good Rails back in the day" thus really isn't dispositive.
They were young, so was I, we all make some bad decisions at that age, it's fine, I don't care. But none of us is young any more, and as an aging hipster once said, there's nothing more contemptible than an aging hipster.