[YeGoblynQueenne]

If I understand correctly (from a quick browse of the docs) this is Ruby _without_ anything remotely like Rails. That makes it interesting.

I did a Rails job once. I kept thinking that I liked the language as a kind of modern OO language in the spirit of Python (and also Lua a bit) but I really disliked the ecosystem around Rails. For instance, the project I worked on had to maintain two separate versions of Ruby because different gems worked with different Ruby versions (it's been a while so I don't remember details).

Another thing that bothered me is that everytime I searched online for help to do something slightly more advanced in Ruby my search results were inundated with "hello world" style posts from aspiring Rails devs eager to advertise their passionf or Rails. I could never find the information I wanted, so I had to do everything the hard way.

Overall I had a horrible experience with Rails though I'm sure it's far from that bad for most. Anyway it's refreshing to see a cool use of Ruby without the Rails.

[unixhero]

A friend of mine sat me down and showed me how to work with rails. We ended up programming the entire weekend and worked our way through a few cases of beer in the same time. Working in rails was incredible and the productivity was unlike anything I have ever seen.

[jack_riminton]

I still can't believe how productive Rails is either. One can literally recreate the most popular CRUD apps in a weekend

I've been learning React and played around with a Rails API backend and separate React front-end and I forget just how much work Rails takes out

[midrus]

I think nowadays there are a lot of people that only built SPAs and never have used a framework such as Rails or Django, and that's a pity. They are missing a perfectly valid and productive way of shipping quality software.

[cashewchoo]

I've had good results with the react-rails gem, basically letting me plop bits of react into a rails view. It's not like, the best the in the world from a pure design standpoint? But it does a really, really good job of not having react step on the toes of all the super nice things that Rails will do for you.

[jack_riminton]

Yeah that sounds like the best of both worlds, I'll give it a try

[vidarh]

I've done Ruby for 16 years at this point, and avoided Rails for most of it, including for most of my webapp work.

I really wish people didn't associate Ruby so much with Rails.

[blacktriangle]

As somebody who loved Ruby, THEN got into Rails, and now really hates Rails, I've made an intentional effort to not to have a meaningful opinion about Ruby itself until I have a good year between me and any rails work. Rails just infects ruby with so many terrible ideas. I suspect going back to pure ruby I won't feel the same way, as I've now reached a point where I see the whole "everything is an object!" design is a huge fail, but that aside I could see rediscovering the fun in the expressiveness of straight ruby code.

But yes, it really is a shame that Rails seems more parasitic on Ruby than not and hasn't lead to a larger general purpose Ruby community.

[bovermyer]

Another major use of Ruby that people seem to forget about is Chef. I really enjoy Chef (chef.io).

[cortesoft]

I have been using ruby professionally for 15 years, and I have not used rails in the last 12. I have not found it difficult to avoid rails stuff when searching for help.