[shubik22]

Have to briefly chime in here to partially defend Rails :)

I agree that immutable data structures > mutable data structures, and while I don't have experience working with Elixir, it's high on my list of new technologies to play around with when I have time. However, although in theory you can go wild mutating your objects and monkeypatching in Rails, in practice those features have never really been a pain point in any of the Rails applications I've worked on, both in personal and professional contexts. Unless you're a very new programmer who doesn't know any better, you're hopefully not mutating the request object in Rails in hidden places, or monkeypatching Object#to_json (for example).

Rather, the difficult parts have been deciding what logic lives where, and other issues more common to web applications overall than Rails specifically. If anything, Rails' convention-driven philosophy (which it sounds like Phoenix follows as well) makes development significantly easier than it otherwise would be, in my experience.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

Rails by default monkey patches the entire ruby language, injects 400 methods on any single model, it creates an enormous amount of dynamic methods through metaprogramming and it monkey patches the loading of ruby files itself.

Rails does an enormous amount of damage right out rails new.

[tmm84]

I understand this frustration very well. I recall one video on learning Rails, the teacher said it would be better to learn Ruby first and then learn Rails. It wasn't until I actually understood Ruby's deep areas that I could understand what was actually going on in Rails and how Rails accomplished it. The idea of sweep the details under the rug and just do it works if you aren't encountering bugs/runtime errors.

[krainboltgreene]

> you're hopefully not mutating the request object in Rails in hidden places

You have to, that's how rails works.