[TheAceOfHearts]

I love Rails for certain projects, but it's definitely true that at a certain point things start to break down. Maintaining a large complex application with Rails is not fun at all. ActiveRecord is amazing, until it's not.

IMO, you can still learn tons of great practices with Rails, and for certain projects I still think it's a great choice... But you have to know when to drop it and move on to more robust solutions.

Like most engineering tools, it makes certain tradeoffs, and you have to know how to pick the right one for your job.

[rimliu]

At certain point everything starts to break down no matter the stack.

[StaticRedux]

You're absolutely right, you're just completely ignoring context. Some things break down a lot sooner. Eating or drinking too much of anything can kill you, even water. But drinking acid will get you there a whole lot faster. Rails is the acid of the programming world.

[ljm]

After many years of working on a variety of Rails projects, I've pretty much come to the same conclusion and, if you look at it another way, it's the same conclusion no matter what you work with.

Rails is incredibly effective for solving the problems that existed at the time it was conceived. CRUD websites, rapid prototypes, things that aren't incredibly complex. Not an exhaustive list, but that's what I reach out to Rails for now.

Once you get past that certain point, not only does the framework fail to offer a convention for the problem you might face, but it also requires a mature team of developers to guide things forward from that point on, and really think about how to build something that Rails itself has no decent answer for. That solution might be to break out of Rails, or switch to raw SQL queries, or to proxy to services that can handle the task better. It's almost never a good idea to double down on the convention at that point.