I'm working on a large (at least 300k+ loc) Django code base right now and we have 32 direct dependencies. Mostly stuff like lxml, pillow and pandas. It's very easy to use all the nice Django libs out there but you don't have to.

Sometimes I think the issue here is churn. Security fixes aside, what is it that updated dependencies really give? Can't some of these projects just... stop?

I have not had this experience as badly with Laravel. Their libraries seem much more stable to me. We've gone up 5 major versions of Laravel over the last year and a half and it was pretty simple for each major version.

Does batteries included somehow result in upgrading years old projects being a larger lift? I would think the opposite.

I've just started using RoR for a live greenfield project since New Year.

Honestly, breath of fresh air.

It's the closest I've come to that old school "in the box" desktop development experience you used to get from building desktop software with Visual Studio or IntelliJ IDEA or NetBeans or Eclipse or any of the other IDEs of the 90s/00s (I never used Delphi or VB but I imagine in some sense they were even moreso than the ones I've listed, which are the ones I used), only it's web development.

For me web development has always felt like a frustrating ordeal of keeping track of 10,000 moving parts that add noise and cognitive load and distract you from fixing the actual problems you're interested in solving. This means the baseline ancillary workload is always frustratingly high. I.e., there's too much yak-shaving.

Whereas Rails seems to drag that all the way down to a level where it feels more similar to the minimal yak-shaving needed to (at least superficially) build, run, and distribute desktop software. Not that this is without its challenges, because every deployment environment is a little different in the desktop world, but the day to day developer experience is much lower friction that modern web development in general.

Also, no sodding TypeScript to deal with. I hate TypeScript: an ugly, verbose, boilerplatey abomination that takes one of the nicest and most fun features of JavaScript (duck typing) and simply bins it off. Awful.

What is STOA standing for here, please?

The "one-person framework" thing is a big draw. I'm amazed at how productive I was in it, and it's not just at the code level. Even though I've been doing sysadmin/devops/architect work for over 25 years now, it's just so damn nice now not to have to think about e.g. standing up a HA PostgreSQL cluster or Redis and deployment is largely a solved problem.

And most folks getting stuff done with Rails ain't be filling out surveys to boost their stack - or maybe that's just me.

So everyone just stop worrying what everyone else thinks or seems to think and just use the right tools for you and get on with it

rails = ruby = oo/mutable && slow && resource hungry

You're about the 5th person now in as many days who has recommended Elixir when I mentioned I was building a project in Ruby. I'll definitely have to check it out for my next project (whatever that may be!)

Can you expand on why you found it so appealing or "holy crap, this is awesome" things I should look at first ?

I usually go full Symfony with my projects until I need to spread it out. But even for interactivity, I first go for htmx and Alpine.js instead of full React or so, where I then need to setup API on backend and frontend.

I think once you're deep into a project, you of course know the features needed and the constraints and you'll be more efficient the next time around.

I think the challenge is to keep working on your old legacy projects.

Plus Symfony is quite flexible on how you want to organize your code. Modular monolith, monolith, DDD, microservices, "junior developer just setting up controllers and entities".

> As for Rails, I guess now that Ruby is serious about having a JIT in the box, a few actually, it is kind of atractive.

Not until they get their gradual typing story straight.

> If your first contact with rails is version 7+ and you’re only comfortable with JS/TS, then you’re not going to get it and might actually strongly dislike it

This is the primary issue with Rails in my experience. It takes intentional effort to internalize the idioms before it clicks and you unlock the magic that makes it so insanely productive. JS devs will keep trying to force backend business logic into Franken-React Stimulus components and complaining it's not very good.

I now also believe that at least Active Record is much easier to use than Django's ORM

The difference between JS frameworks and RoR/Laravel is the ecosystem cohesion. RoR and Laravel ecosystems employ the RoR or Laravel way of doing things and everything works together very smoothly.

JS solutions are loosely coupled, lots of good reasons to do so, but comes at a major complexity cost.

Eh, there's NestJs and AdonisJs if you want opinionated MVC with lots of built-ins like CSRF and ORMs.

But you can also pick tight packages that do one thing well. Something like oRPC + Drizzle that lets you pipe data from your database to frontend with full typing and cross-boundary go-to-definition while covering most of what Nest and Adonis do with better focused APIs.

And in terms of security, I'll take Typescript with a strong compiler config anyday. For example, I disable: `any`, non-null asserts (no `!`), floating promises without `void` for explicitness, no unnecessary conditions, and a bunch of other strict rules. I also use Branded Types liberally. All of that makes logical errors that can become app-specific security issues (and are thus less readily detected) much less likely to happen. And as a bonus you get really reliable code too.

Javascript frameworks just do SSR + Express-style api routes. They don't handle SQL injection prevention because they don't deal with databases at all. CSRF prevention is less important in todays world tho.

Author of the article here (hi! Anxiously watching my Grafana stack right now...)

I've only just noticed that on the Rails homepage, and while I acknowledge everyone's chasing that sweet sweet AI hype, I gotta say that's... disappointing[1]. The reason I fell in love with Ruby (and by extension, Rails) is because it enabled me as a human to express myself through code. Not to become a glorified janitor for a LLM.

[1]=Well, I had a stronger response initially but I toned it down a bit for here...

> Accelerate your agents with convention over configuration. Ruby on Rails scales from PROMPT to IPO. Token-efficient code that's easy for agents to write and beautiful for humans to review

This is so painful... I can't help but wonder who they're trying to target with such inane slogans.

Rails is amazing, but "token-efficiency" is not on the list of reasons why.

> what's the difference if my agent uses fucking Next, Nuxt, Rails or Django?

The claim seems quite clear to me: "convention over configuration allows coding agents to be more effective".

But yes, I do agree that the main line should say what Ruby on Rails actually is, not why it's good for your agent.

>If we are all supposed to be talking to agents now, what's the difference[...]?

it's a little cringe, but arguably the benefit of having agents use rails would be tht when you review and audit the agent produced code, you review something that is, as you put it: "beautiful and simple code" and "making it easy to reason about..."

I loved rails back in 2017. I may be an outlier but the line tempts me to try it again despite having adopted the who cares attitude to langs. Would be nice to hear from someone first hand if they felt it helped.

I thought you were joking so I went to check it myself and... unfortunately you were not. That is insane.

Don't worry, it's just the hype phase and it will pass. (By 'pass' I mean agent-coding will be so ubiquitous that it's a given and not worth mentioning.)

Oh boy. I can't even imagine what sort of hell an AI could unleash on a language as dynamic and magical as Ruby...

both statements are true though. rails excels in the AI world because it's extremely cared for and intentional with language. and there's a ton of built up knowledge.

fwiw that headline is cringey for sure. but DHH has proven himself a great marketer. it very likely is riding the wave.

That is just DHH (/37signals) being expert(s) at positioning.

Trying to answer the question of, why is language and framework still relevant in a world where almost everyone uses an agent for coding?