The conversation in this comments has become a lightning rod for Rails hate, and the "impossibility" of upgrading! (Somewhat to be expected on HN.)
However, for almost all Rails developers, upgrading is usually not a huge issue, at least since Rails 3 came around. I've been doing Rails development for 3 years, and I've yet to spend more than a couple hours on an upgrade. All in all, you have to realize this -- Rails upgrading troubles are something that happen once a year, maybe twice a year at best. In the worst case it'll take about half a day of work. Is it really worth tossing the whole framework out just because of that?
Here's my take on the 4 possible issues the author mentioned:
1) If you're >= Rails 3, almost all upgrades are painless. Even Rails 3 -> Rails 4 wasn't that bad, as the only sort of breaking change was strong parameters. The difficulty of changing that varies greatly on the size of your application, but it's more likely just a tedious couple hours of work and you're done.
2) Application size - see above.
3) Use of external libraries - eh, what I usually do is just wait a few weeks when the next edge Rails comes out, and by that point, the open source community has fixed its stuff. Or, even better, contribute!
4) Test coverage - I've never been at a legitimate Rails shop that doesn't do test coverage. Testing is brought to the extreme with all Rails apps -- and if you aren't writing tests, you probably aren't a Rails dev.
However, for almost all Rails developers, upgrading is usually not a huge issue, at least since Rails 3 came around. I've been doing Rails development for 3 years, and I've yet to spend more than a couple hours on an upgrade. All in all, you have to realize this -- Rails upgrading troubles are something that happen once a year, maybe twice a year at best. In the worst case it'll take about half a day of work. Is it really worth tossing the whole framework out just because of that?
Here's my take on the 4 possible issues the author mentioned:
1) If you're >= Rails 3, almost all upgrades are painless. Even Rails 3 -> Rails 4 wasn't that bad, as the only sort of breaking change was strong parameters. The difficulty of changing that varies greatly on the size of your application, but it's more likely just a tedious couple hours of work and you're done.
2) Application size - see above.
3) Use of external libraries - eh, what I usually do is just wait a few weeks when the next edge Rails comes out, and by that point, the open source community has fixed its stuff. Or, even better, contribute!
4) Test coverage - I've never been at a legitimate Rails shop that doesn't do test coverage. Testing is brought to the extreme with all Rails apps -- and if you aren't writing tests, you probably aren't a Rails dev.