I don’t understand why Ruby and Rails get a reputation for being outdated or “legacy.” Over the last several years both have seen massive numbers of contributions, both in improvements and new features. I’d be surprised if any tool for building a new web app could even come close to what Rails has to offer across the full stack.

I've been toying with Perl+CGI-scripts lately and find its super productive with the benefit that I can do serverless without the lock-in.

I don't think the software engineering field is particularly rational and mostly follows trends or what looks good or familiar. We have a proclivity to assume that anything old is legacy. Most developer have never studied any CS history and are quite young, so they're bound to reinvent the wheel as well.

I think its fine to use older technology if its the right fit for the problem, and since the tech is battle-tested, you can read up as to why it went out-of-fashion, and as a result can minimize the risks with using it. It's "predictably disappointing".

Since it doesn't have as much interest from FAANG people treat it like its dead meat. Rails powers a ton of smaller apps (and some very large ones) but everyone thinks their idea is the going to be the second coming and therefore it needs all the insane optimizations that power Google etc.

It's because it's not receiving a constant hype that other fullstack frameworks have, so people thing it's outdated. But in reality, Rails is boring, it's a beast and it just works

It’s the same thing with php. I would say it’s probably because they are languages from the 90s, but then you have python and JavaScript which are from the same era too and people never question their relevance or “modernity”. All of these languages (even java) have been in constant development since then and all of them have modern features. Why are some considered modern and some outdated when they are all basically from the same era?

A truly modern language is Rust.

This is anecdotal, but one thing I do when comparing languages and frameworks, is browse the most popular libraries on GitHub from that ecosystem, and see how much maintenance they're getting. I usually use the contributors graph, as well as review how/when issues are handled. Ruby projects seem to have the most contributors maintaining the "deepest" libraries of any ecosystem I've seen, consistently, for the longest time. In other ecosystems I keep seeing one guy trickle-maintain some massively popular (based on stars) project that fizzled out over time. You could argue that some of that is due to "completeness", but I keep seeing evidence to the contrary: still many unsolved issues, but the initial activity spike subsides down to a trickle. To me that's what represents the health of an ecosystem: not how many new projects are created, but rather how well supported existing projects are.

I think it's just so strongly associated with a certain era (10-15 years ago) that it's hard for people to get it into the present day. Also, Rails is so dominant in Ruby that there aren't libraries/frameworks for the "latest trends" with as much mindshare.

I wouldn't be against starting a new project in Ruby or RoR.

I feel its the MVC part that IMHO kind of sucks. I really dont like how it couples you to all sorts of frameworky stuff. A simple router is what you really need in 99% of cases.

For anything else you might use ruby for you can use python, so you might as well just use python.

If rails is the best at making web apps, and other ecosystems in other languages maybe get you 90% of the way, might as well use something else and not deal with ruby sucking at other jobs.

Agreed!

Rails has bad spa suppott.

because they are not javascript??? you realise that ruby and php still need to interact to JS in the end

so why not use JS directly or build on top of that???? that's what people do