I felt like I entered some time wrap, was this written in 2007/2008? Can't believe someone writing this in 2013 since so much of the arguments are from those days. That rails shops with more than 9 months of development are festering piles of magic code is not news. Let's take a step back and ask why would anyone write a new Rails app in 2013. When rails came out in 2003/4 (yes it is now a decade) it was really neat. However things have changed dramatically as far as client/server capabilities are concerned and it is wise to revisit assumptions. Key points<p>1. Javascript is now anywhere from 20 to 50 times faster than it was in 2003.<p>2. Javascript is supremely better than ruby in building UI and DOM manipulation. It is even faster in doing straight computations.<p>3. Clients are now 10 times more powerful (approx. memory/cpu-core wise) and even mobile phones have more memory/capability than a desktop computer of 2003.<p>4. Rails remains the slowest and least efficient server side language by a huge margin.<p>5. Mobile/Tablets have their own UI/View concepts and work best with a server API that just serves json type data.<p>So why would you bottleneck your application through a rails server. Best to have your server be a provider of services (security, data store, integration with backend etc). Most computation and UI manipulation is probably better done in javascript. What is that rails provides that say PHP cannot provide in this new way of doing things. It feels like with, say, AngularJS + server API (not doing everything) we are much better served by having computation distributed in the right way.
A very serious question:<p>Why the proliferation of server side environment like: Node.js, ASP.NET (C#), Java, ColdFusion, PHP, Ruby, etc.? I've found nothing so complicated about old languages (C++, etc.) that could not of had a web library added around them to do the exact same thing. Is SSL, cookies, and the HTTP protocol that complicated to warrant all of this?<p>Was it because of shared hosting (and thus running your own custom executable) that gave rise to all this? The products I'm wanting to make for the web can't use PHP, Ruby type environments. I'm looking at Node.js or a C++ version of the same.<p>We'll most likely output JSON and have JavaScript assemble the GUI on the client side thus making what these frameworks do nothing but the most basic of tasks.
"this pragmatism produces elegant solutions"
I disagree. I think the pragmatism encourages one to "be clever" and just "get it done". Often this is not elegant.
In my experience, most clients we worked with did not request Rails, it was foisted upon by developers who say the five minute blog video, tried to model the business problem, failed, left for shiny new gig, the client is left vulnerable to the many, many security issues, and a code base that brings tears to the eye of even a hardened developer.<p>The worst development gig out there? Walking into a Rails code base more than six months old. You are probably the third person to attempt taming the stink feet of magic magic code and thousands of useless unit tests and cucumber drivel that looks fab in a pretty graph but tests almost none of the core important business logic nor really helps anyone understand what was actually requested.
It amazes me that so many people cite the blub essay while behaving exactly as the essay describes a blub programmer. Ruby is not near the top of the spectrum, you aren't even aware of the languages that are at the top of the spectrum.