Comment by michaelbuckbee
9 hours ago
As a long time Ruby dev it's really hard to separate from Rails...and there has been both drama (which is ok to an extent, you want passionate people to care about things), but it's unfortunately led to some severe stagnation on the part of the Rails ecosystem versus rivals.
At a time where other frameworks (thinking mostly of Next+Vercel and Laravel here) are merging their frameworks with hosting, deployment, services and ops the Rails ecosystem has gone the other way and tried to bring back "you can host it yourself on a VPS!".
While there are merits to both approaches, the market really seems to have spoken and it prefers the integrated approach.
My memory of Next (and somewhat Laravel, although I'm definitely stale in php) is not so much that they got traction because of the hosting/deployment.
They were decent free frameworks that started getting popular, and the hosting/deployment tooling came later as a way for the companies to make money.
I don't see Rails skipping the tooling there as a bad thing, although I also don't see adding that tooling as a bad thing either.
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That said - I really don't like modern Rails all that much. And I think that does directly play into the issue, because I think you're entirely right that Ruby and Rails are tightly coupled in a bad way for Ruby.
Basically - Modern Rails reminds me of legacy ASP tooling from the microsoft world... It does it all, magically (wizard me up a new controller, magic man!), and god fucking help you if it breaks. It's not that it's impossible to untangle, but good luck hunting down your exact spot where the magic broke and then finding decent documentation for your specific version of Rails, buried under all the blog-trash weight of the old versions.
Combined with relatively poor documentation (seriously, why is this so bad?), and it's not a fun framework to use as a newcomer.
The cherry on top is that lots of companies that are Rails shops are now fairly mature, and have relatively large codebases and teams, and Ruby is genuinely bad for large teams.
My first run in with Ruby was for CLI tooling way back around it's initial 1.0 release, and I like Ruby quite a bit in that space, but I won't install it just for that. Too much momentum for Node/Python which are almost always there in some form or another by default.
Rails needs a "Dotnet Core" variant with less magic, less stuff in general, and solid conceptual documentation as a breathe of fresh air. Because I'd actually pick Dotnet Core over Rails right now (or ideally, neither).
Shopify uses Rails to serve nearly a billion users, and they fund several people specifically to improve tooling. Look into @burke for example.
> At a time where other frameworks (thinking mostly of Next+Vercel and Laravel here) are merging their frameworks with hosting, deployment, services and ops
You mean doing what Ruby did 19 years ago?