[jfaucett]

> I've been doing Rails development for ~10 years...

I'm a long time Rails dev as well. IMHO the main problem with the Ruby ecosystem is that the libraries haven't moved on into the current day and age. I find myself building more and more projects in something like Java or Python because those ecosystems have the firepower of the ML, AI, data processing libraries. And while I'd still say Rails is the best for building pure web and rest API stuff, Java and Python have gained a lot of ground and when all your real app power is in Python or Java a lot of times its not worth wrapping your core apps in another runtime just to provide a rest interface.

Any other rails / ruby devs experiencing this?

[3pt14159]

I hesitate to even say that I'm a Rails guy anymore because I've modified it for my own purposes so heavily that it's fundamentally a different thing[0] but I'm also a data scientist and when I need data science I just use python. It's so much easier to just have python / cython / numba and Rails share databases and just communicate through that when needed. For the stuff that can't communicate through the DB I can either fork off traffic to python in nginx or communicate through something that unix provides (pipes, ports, files, 0mq, whatever).

Ruby / Rails is so much more productive for me. No other language nails so many features as well as Ruby. Blocks are great, the meta-programming is natural and easy to debug, c-extensions are easy, and I generally like the balance it strikes with types. Couple quibbles here and there, to be sure, but usually the DB acts as my type enforcer and the high degree of test coverage covers the rest. Plus whenever I think something is risky I just throw in an explicit type coercion or exception, but it is rare.

I find people generally fall into one of three categories: Documentation enthusiasts, type enthusiasts, or test enthusiasts. Because I prefer human readable code I prefer meta-programming and because I prefer meta-programming I prefer tests over types or documentation. Though I don't pretend it's drawback-free, it is the environment that makes me happiest.

I think my next major thing will be to modify ruby itself because there are things that are missing that I feel could make it even better, but I'm trying to figure out if I can get away with just doing it in a really powerful gem.

[0] Designing for billions of writes per day, JSON API 1.1 + auto linking and pagination, dead simple defaults for controllers, lots of extra methods for better code legibility, etc. I've been thinking of extracting it all out into its own thing but I don't want to deal with the headaches of communicating breaking API changes.

[nolite]

Absolutely. Another 10yr Rails dev here. I believe that rails is untouchable as far is it comes to the ecosystem of gems and getting something quickly built and online, however I’m now moving all future apps to Django/ flask in python to take more advantage of the serverless ecosystem, and all of the data processing libraries out there. I’ll miss you Ruby