What's great about Rails ? Serious question from someone who landed into a mature Rails app and is now decidedly running away from that ecosystem after a year working in it.
Rails looks like an early take on MVC that was setup around fast project creation and encourages unmaintainable code - concerns are straight out retarded (a design pattern that encourages breaking encapsulation and makes dependencies impossible to trace) and fat models encourage coupling things that don't need to be coupled.
Then there's Ruby which in my opinion goes against Zen of Python which I'm a fan of - aliases all over the place for same thing, pointless name shortening and stuff to sacrifice readability, rails breaking conventions of standard library...
In the context of when it got popular I understand why it got the hype - replacing the PHP SQL in views garbage and Java 6 verbosity with XML configure everything, and the horrible ASP monstrosity.
These days I'd take Python as a more popular language, that I would say is better designed and has far better Windows support.
NPM/TypeScript and structural static typing is getting really good as well but is not as mature - but code sharing between client and server is a real thing.
Go emerged since the time of Rails hype.
.NET and JVM languages and frameworks got a lot better and scale far better with big code bases.
I don't really see where Rails is great compared to alternatives, it feels like legacy at this point.
I'm not saying you can't write good maintainable apps in Rails either - I'm just saying other frameworks and languages will make it easier IMO.
Rails looks like an early take on MVC that was setup around fast project creation and encourages unmaintainable code - concerns are straight out retarded (a design pattern that encourages breaking encapsulation and makes dependencies impossible to trace) and fat models encourage coupling things that don't need to be coupled.
Then there's Ruby which in my opinion goes against Zen of Python which I'm a fan of - aliases all over the place for same thing, pointless name shortening and stuff to sacrifice readability, rails breaking conventions of standard library...
In the context of when it got popular I understand why it got the hype - replacing the PHP SQL in views garbage and Java 6 verbosity with XML configure everything, and the horrible ASP monstrosity.
These days I'd take Python as a more popular language, that I would say is better designed and has far better Windows support.
NPM/TypeScript and structural static typing is getting really good as well but is not as mature - but code sharing between client and server is a real thing.
Go emerged since the time of Rails hype.
.NET and JVM languages and frameworks got a lot better and scale far better with big code bases.
I don't really see where Rails is great compared to alternatives, it feels like legacy at this point. I'm not saying you can't write good maintainable apps in Rails either - I'm just saying other frameworks and languages will make it easier IMO.