[davidw]

Rails. Nothing really beats it for the combination of

* Getting something up and running quickly. Something that does what you want.

* Iterating quickly on the thing you're building. Need a library (gem)? There's very likely a pretty good one.

* Building the thing in a fairly clean way (tests, code organization) in a way that's not too bureaucratic and tedious.

* Friendly community of people.

I've done some playing around with Elixir/Phoenix, coming from the background of a long-time Erlang user as well as Rails, and it's fun to learn, but I'm not 100% convinced that it's more productive than Rails outside of some niches. It's certainly not a bad thing to learn, though.

[mikeryan]

I’m at least a bit amused that you have a whole comment about how nice rails is without mentioning ruby ;-)

[davidw]

To me it's just sort of a given that Ruby is pleasant to work with. Otherwise Rails wouldn't be. If Rails itself were unpleasant, though, merely being in Ruby wouldn't be enough to make up for that.

[mikeryan]

I actually meant it affectionately. I always enjoyed using Ruby and wish it had a larger footprint outside of Rails.

[stonecharioteer]

I believe this is why ruby decreased in popularity. Rails preceded its reputation. A similar thing almost happened with Django and Python. I've heard of a few people who call themselves django developers.