| As a Ruby/Rails dev, the OP makes a good, directionally correct point: "I don’t believe that simply being better than Rails is enough to displace Rails." However, he's off by a bit. It's going to take another framework to not just be "simply better". This framework will need to be an order of magnitude better to get me to switch from the amazingly productive Rails ecosystem. The framework/language marketplace is crowded and you are going to really need to standout to get any serious adoption to compete. For me, the cost of switching all new development projects to Hanami seems to out-weight the benefits (this also assumes Rails is the correct tool for the job of course, which it often isn't). That said, a Rails/Hanami/Sinatra framework built on the Crystal language, which looks almost exactly like Ruby but gives you C performance, appears like it might be that order-of-magnitude to 100x game-changer that could get me to switch stacks. [0] Whether you like him or not, Peter Thiel has some good thoughts when it comes to innovation and I think this argument perfectly encompasses this Rails/Hanami discussion: "As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage. Anything less than an order of magnitude better will probably be perceived as a marginal improvement and will be hard to sell, especially in an already crowded market. The clearest way to make a 10x improvement is to invent something completely new."[1] [0] https://crystal-lang.org/
[1] Zero to One - http://amzn.to/2GaaMP0 |