[TheRealDunkirk]

I've been with Rails since about the beginning. I prototyped a rewrite of a production web app in the 0.x days, and decided it wasn't ready yet. (Hey, it WAS pre-1.0.) I got back to it in the 2.x days, and it's been my main tool ever since.

I just looked at the page for Express, and the sticking point is in the title: "unopinionated." I WANT a HEAVILY opinionated stack. I LOVE that I can write 1 line of code in 3 specific places in the Rails directory tree to accomplish something that would take me literally 300 lines of raw Java and Typescript in an Angular world. Some people hate it; that's their prerogative. But this is the difference between Rails and so many other stacks: opinionation.

Yes, it takes time to learn where to put stuff. If that irks you, I'd recommend staying away from Rails. The opinionation is what allows me to leverage the stack to be as productive as whole teams of people banging away on Java.

[bhahn]

I agree. I believe the phrase they tend to use more is convention over configuration.

[cutler]

"Rails is Omakase" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E99FnoYqoII.

[thesimon]

Regarding Java: Spring Boot is highly opinionated and also allows you to do stuff with very little LoC.

[TheRealDunkirk]

I was USING Spring, and it was STILL taking 100x the code to write a simple CRUD app in Java/Angular than Rails. You can say, "You were doing it wrong," and you may be right, but I researched examples so hard that I finally emailed the author of jHipster, and got a lead to a GitHub repo I hadn't found in months of looking. It was great, except that it was so out of date, it wouldn't work in current versions of Angular. If Spring is what passes for "opinionated" in the Java world, boy, do I have a bridge to sell to you.