Working with a large codebase with an untyped codebase is just a nightmare, even with powerful IDEs like RubyMine that are able to cover some of the paint points. I wonder how good Sorbet is these days, though, especially the RoR experience

I’m not into RoR, because I was mainly PHP rescuer in the beginning of my career, but they both are just problem solvers. Sit down, write minimal (in case of PHP not so cool looking) code and proceed to next task.

The premise that you get meaningful efficiencies from JavaScript on the back-end just because you have to use it on the front-end has been pretty thoroughly debunked at this point. Instead you mostly get a larger blast radius when the front-end ecosystem has its monthly identity crisis. OP's "stacks-du-jour" and programming language "flavour of the month" framing is exactly right. A shocking amount of web software architecture is just following fashion trends dressed up as technical decision-making.

Most of the churn in tech stack isn't driven by engineering requirements, it's driven by résumé optimization and Hacker News anxiety. Rails has quietly been powering serious businesses the whole time. Does anyone think NPM's 3.1 million packages enable more functionality than RubyGems' 190,000 packages?

Right now, I would rather use Go with a simple framework, or even without one. With Go, it's so easy just to copy the binary over.

Not many frameworks have been thriving that long, and there's good reason.

It packs everything, is tidy and productive, with a pleasant language to read and write.

In the latest Stackoverflow survey, it's back at the "top 5 of desired stacks to use for next project" over a decade after its inception !

Give it a try.

I moved on, not because Rails failed me, but because the things I started building next (Streaming infra, APIs behind proxies, lots of concurrent HTTP work, infrastructure tooling, AI/ML) just fit better in other languages. I pick tools by the problem, not loyalty.

What I notice in this thread is a lot of "Rails vs X" framing when the real answer is boring: use Rails (if you like the vision and Ruby) when the complexity is in the data model and business logic. Use something else when it's in concurrency or infrastructure. The one-person-framework pitch is real, but it's for a specific shape of problem.

Also: God i miss writing Ruby, its a fantastically and beautiful language.

Also: Blast from the past: Ruby is a great DSL for Rails.

I gave RoR a try last year, and so far I'm at the same level I was with the other projects but I actually enjoy programming the project after the PoC phase. Maybe because third time's a charm? Maybe because I know what I need to do? Who knows! But RoR fits in that idiom.

Just to note, its a really boring app thats been done before (odeva.app)

however if your app doesn't fit the standard crud pattern you end just fiddling with a lot of things that you shouldn't and in that case I recommend Django which provides enough flexibility while providing a good base. There's less magic in Django

Having the productivity of Ruby + the static typing and LSP integrations is a wonderful combination. Sure, it might be less aesthetic than some might like, but at least in my experience, it works very well in practice and supports most of the needs I have from a type system for writing and understanding conventional software.

I'm rooting for further developments in this space because I love language and systems that can leverage it's strengths and layering on a type system makes it a very formidable technology for building real world products.

I have not used Rails in a few years, but I can also say that the Sorbet typing support for the framework is definitely there too -- to great credit to the folks at Shopify allowing users of the framework to benefit from this tooling.

I would happily work on a Rails system today too. It's an amazing testament to the community how the design has been able to continue to develop to meet the needs of the many developers building with it up to this point. I hope more people feel the same joy I do discovering the kinds of things they can make with the language and frameworks like Rails.

With the amazing advancements with the AI tools we have now the only real limits are with how big our imaginations and ambitions can get.

In part because for a modern frontend dx you will need hot reload, bundling, etc. But even if you make an SPA and only use eg .NET for an API, using something like OpenAPI to share the schema is a subpar solution. There's really nothing as good as sharing TS types across your whole app(s).

You don't know how happy I was to read this... I thought I had a serious problem with getting distracted with my "projects" but it seems this is much more normal than I thought ;-)

However, modern day JS frameworks don't care about this at all. Most of them love flaunting about their raw performance numbers. Security? Fuck that. Not even basic form CSRF protection. A lot of times, there is not even SQL injection prevention in them.

Compound this with someone who just vibe codes their app on top of these frameworks - that's how you end up getting hacked. Every week there is an incident. That's why good frameworks like Rails are very important. People who actually care about writing secure, good quality software are on the decline, but thank God rails still exists as an option in 2026 despite the fact.

I’m usually a Go person and love it, but building simple crud routes is not the fun part of it.

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.

Due to my experience with Tcl, and continuous rewriting into C modules, if a JTI isn't in the box, I kind of don't bother unless it is due to external factors.

I have the impression, though, that these days it only appeals to those who picked it up before version 3 or 4, when it was smaller, maybe more understandable, and incredibly better than all the competing frameworks (except Django maybe).

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

[^1]: https://github.com/mame/ai-coding-lang-bench?tab=readme-ov-f...

Have so many good memories working with Ruby.

If anyone has old codebase need to be updated and upgraded, refreshed. I am happy to do that.

ideally a JS frontend app won't show logic not intended for the user type in question.

in practice, really often I see a huge app covering all roles and cases, a trove of info for the red team. and even worse, the reality of software development with LLMs in 2026 is plenty of code is being shipped without security audit.

I know it's not an inherent fault of the JS frameworks. bit I share what I see on the streets, most of custom JS apps I see are way more vulnerable to hacking than a old-style MVC app.

yes it is possible to make mistakes in both styles, but in JS apps I probably see 400% more easily discovered vulnerabilities than in a common MVC (even with stimulus) app

> 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

And I fucking hate it. If I read this the first time I would think this is some kind of tool to optimize your LLM agents.

I have been using Rails for over a decade now and always liked the focus on writing beautiful and simple code. On making it easy to reason about with colleagues. Now it seems like DHH is throwing all what made Rails special overboard.

If we are all supposed to be talking to agents now, what's the difference if my agent uses fucking Next, Nuxt, Rails or Django?

rails lost it's convention over configuration ways, the generated app is dozens of files, lack of explanations and guidance on how to setup various things like environments, kamal being the worst offender and the changes between recent major releases aren't making it any easier to read the (often ai slop) articles and docs

It's not just Rails. Ruby is dying. And has been for quite some years now.

The strangest things are people writing blog entries claiming the opposite. Like "ruby ages like fine wine". No, that is incorrect - it is dying. I have been using Ruby since about 2004 or 2005. I still use it just about daily. I started before Rails and couldn't care any less about Rails; sadly the ecosystem is infiltrated by corporations such as shopify and others. You can see how they took over RubyCentral effectively (and if they insinuate otherwise - nope, I am not an idiot. I see the pattern. I notice what is happening. You call a black cat a green frog and I call bullshit. It's a black cat. See RubyCentral running amok already before they mass-purged developers, but that's another story - let's go back to ruby, and rails.)

> And Ruby itself is nowhere near the top 10 languages, sitting just underneath Lua and freaking Assembly language in terms of popularity!

Yup. Ruby is dying. It is following perl.

Now, defining "dying" is hard because you still have an active community, even outside of the train wrek that is rails (anyone still caring what random crap DHH writes on his blog? I've noticed fewer people care about the garbage he publishes, other than making fun when shopify damages the ecosystem - oh wait, he sits on the board of shopify. Did I already point out how much damage shopify causes here?).

> But I’m a stubborn bastard, and if I find a technology I like, I’ll stick with it particularly for projects where I don’t have to care about what anyone else is using or what the latest trend is.

On this part I agree. Ruby as a language is very well designed. It is a great language. I don't think anyone really objects to this, so the criticism has to be split - some criticism is valid, some is not. As a language ruby is well designed.

Nonetheless it is dying too. That is also a factual statement. Anyone claiming the opposite is wrong. At the least this is the case right now, and has been in the last some years, to varying extent.

> realised Ruby was “a better Perl than Perl”.

Also true. Ruby is the better perl. But I actually call Ruby syntactic sugar over C, because this is actually what Ruby is, if you think it through. My use cases are mostly helper-scripts, tons of that, over whatever I do in general. Literally everything computer-related. That includes use cases for the world wide web. All my needs here are covered by Ruby - but not by rails. I don't need rails.

Sadly, ruby also has a second problem: documentation. The documentation is crap in general. Look at rack. Opal. WebAssembly for Ruby. That documentation is a joke. An insult. Even sinatra, though better documented than these, has a bad documentation for the most part. There are some exceptions; for instance, hexapdf is well documented, and Jeremy's projects are also well-documented. So I am not saying everything is poorly documented. But for a language that once claimed it wants to compete against python ... sorry, documentation-wise this is still an epic failure point. In some ways ruby actually deserves to follow the path to extinction like perl did, merely because it failed to adjust, adapt and really improve. Yes, there is some internal improvement, but in many ways ruby failed to solve the problems people critisized it for, for many years. And now catching up is SUPER hard. I don't think it can happen anymore. I thought it was possible 10 years ago, but the last 5 years made it clear that ruby is towards extinction. It still does not change me using it, since ruby covers my use cases, but anyone thinking there will be an influx of new young folk driving ruby forward, is just worshipping an illusion here.

> There’s just this minimal translation required between what I’m thinking and what I type.

That's true. Ruby is kind of transitioning your thoughts into code.

> Sure, I can knock things together in Python, Go, or whatever the flavour of the month is, but I always feel on some level like I’m fighting the language rather than working with it.

Kind of, though python works fairly well too.

> And of course there was the welcoming, quirky “outsider” community feel with characters like Why the Lucky Stiff and their legendary Poignant Guide To Ruby.

Well - _why ragequit when someone doxxed him. But even aside from this, I found the poignant guide super-confusing. It was art, but I prefer less confusion myself. Still, _why is gone from the ruby ecosystem. Supposedly he is still doing computer-related stuff in reallife but he is no longer really affiliated with ruby as such. Did I already point out that ruby is dying?

> it’s just so nice being able to write things like

    unless date <= 3.days.from_now

    if upload_size > 2.megabytes

No other programming language brings developer joy because……. errrr because ……. Well because we are just super certain and confident, that’s why! Oh and DHH said so.

I started my dev career with php and then nodejs, but recently got a job with rails, and honestly, it’s the worst among the 3.

There is no static typing whatsoever, it’s littered with magically generated methods, on a moderate size project the controllers or models directories grow to dozen of files. In general it feels like you need a lot of mental context in order to work with Rails, and I believe this is the reason people who run it for 10+ years in production love it. They simply carry all the magic in their heads, rather than let the framework guide you.

I, however, get much more DX and production stability by building with a boring (router + server side rendering) NodeJS stack with typescript and schema validation. My services are more stable and do not crash on “undefined method foo for nil”.

I guess people will defend whatever they know best, even if it has quirks.

On a positive note, I like ruby as a language. It has cool features like pattern matching, named arguments, or dropping verbose statements like “return” at the end of the function.

It's been 20 years, and Ruby/Rails still can't get their typing working.