When Rails first came around in 2004, web development was in a very different state than it was today. JavaScript was still pretty much restricted to the browser, since Node.js wouldn’t come around until 2010, Java was being written without frameworks like Spring Boot to make it somewhat bearable, and the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) was in vogue, due to PHP being widely supported and easy to deploy
A lot of time has passed since the early days of Rails, however. Why would anyone use Rails, or even dive back into learning it after all this time…
At the risk of sounding like a hater, I’ll say that this medium article was a disappointment. Maybe I was expecting too much, but in the age of a 5 second attention span if you are going to get any eyeballs you need substance and sadly the soup was there, but no meat or potatoes.
TLDR: He loves Rails because it’s fun, makes things easier and has “great documentation”.
I have a couple of rebuttals to most of his arguments but life is too short. Use what you love and enjoy what you do.
With a range of impactful updates in Rails 8, developers will be able to focus building their applications instead of dealing with infrastructure complexities.
The world of Ruby and Rails is full of magic, but their ecosystem is mature and has a huge amount of out-of-the-box functionality. Although I prefer Elixir/Phoenix, I can still see its value.
Each ecosystem have some unique or just very new features/ideas implemented that you want to see in the other. There is really no good answer here except your preference. If you feel best in Elixir go for it.
For sure sometimes it’s worth to leave your comfort zone, it’s especially true for new developers, to get to know the alternatives. You either would respect your preference even more or you would want to make it better. After all your preferred environment setup would be better with each small change, so anyway you would respect your final choice much more.
