[leklund]

“and I’ve never see a Rails app age well.”

Seems like this describes any app in any language I’ve ever worked on. Certainly Rails apps are more prone to this phenomenon because of the low barrier entry. Having worked with apps that have grown from Rails 2 through 5 (and soon 6) it’s quite possible to build Rails apps that “age well”.

Case in point for a Rails app that can age well is GitHub. When they launched in 2008 they were probably using Rails 2.0.2 (best guess based on release notes).

[philwelch]

To be fair, I've never seen GitHub's codebase. In fact, I'm not entirely sure if it's even still the same "Rails app", or if they've moved to a microservice architecture or something.

[pwelch]

Not sure what microservice architecture has to do with it. You can have microservices that are Rails apps. :)

[philwelch]

Yes but if you change architectures, you will have replaced much of your original codebsae.

[pwelch]

Agreed, any application regardless of language or framework can age poorly. I've seen some pretty solid "long running" Rails applications that were just maintained well.