[yoyonamite]

I still reach for Rails a lot for prototyping. If the application can leverage Rails core functionality and the bigger gems in the ecosystem, I find it the quickest to prototype in, and the point of a prototype to me is to optimize for speed and customer feedback, often as the only developer. In many cases, the prototype needs to be re-written anyways when core assumptions don't survive encounters with the customer.

I think the reason this productivity exists is the all batteries included approach. For example, if I build a Rails gem, I can include data persistence through ActiveRecord and that code becomes less code that the developer using my library would have to write. Multiply that out by the various core libraries and the time savings can become significant.

I would also point out that for very early stage startups, the biggest problem is speed of development with only one to two devs. If they can't get the features out to reach product-market fit, it doesn't matter how good the performance of their application is.