[bamfly]

> - rails is mostly needed for prototyping and crud apps

> - this work is typically done by juniors

> - rails devs are at this point largely seniors, not juniors

> - rails devs pay the bills with other tech or by maintaining legacy rails apps.

- and those prototyping apps have very often gone through multiple teams, some or all of them probably outsourced. Potentially true of any codebase, but it's true of an exceptionally high proportion of Rails codebases.

I'm at the point where I'd want a stupid premium to come in on an existing Rails codebase, and I'd want a day or two with it before saying "yes" even at that. They're great if they've been maintained by professional, expert teams their whole life, but god-awful messes remarkably resistant to analysis, otherwise.

I like Ruby a lot but most of the jobs are in Rails, and after initial infatuation followed by repeated exposure over 15ish years, I've come around to pretty much hating Rails. Too much implicit magic, too much memorization, too opaque to tools that might help overcome those first two problems.

[kubectl_h]

> Too much implicit magic, too much memorization, too opaque to tools that might help overcome those first two problems.

If you are a senior level Rails developer none of this is true except maybe memorization and that seems to be a pre-requisite for any senior engineer in any language. It's trivial to debug rails applications with debugger and reading the underlying source code. Everything you need to solve problems is a binding.pry or `bundle open` away.

[bamfly]

If you're having to poke around in running code to find out WTF some symbol even is and where it comes from, and that's not a very uncommon thing to have to do, that's unacceptable IMO.

> that seems to be a pre-requisite for any senior engineer in any language

In many languages and language-ecosystems, there's little point to memorizing e.g. method names and signatures that you're not using so often that memorization happens naturally, because your tools can remind you when you, fairly seamlessly, when you need to know. A lot less memorization goes a lot farther in those worlds, than it does in Rails, and the pain of encountering something one is not familiar with is near-zero. Coming back to them after a year or two—or five—away's not a big deal. The brain-space required for Rails is unusually large, and the rate of rot in Rails skill is high. Ramp-up time in an unfamiliar Rails codebase is rough, and requires assistance from those already "read in" to avoid a bunch of wasted time tracking down which gem provides such-and-such dynamically-named object or method or what-have-you. "Which library is this even from?" is not a question that ever reaches the level of conscious thought, in many other languages & frameworks.

Getting up-to-speed on an unfamiliar Rails codebase is full of little side-quests that simply aren't needed elsewhere, and you have to hold a lot more in your head to remain productive in it, than other systems require. This is obviously not impossible, but... oof, why?

All that written out... there's a chance I'd still pick it for a new, solo project, depending on the task. It's fine as long as you are very-familiar with the entire codebase, and some of its gems are major time-savers. I get why companies, and especially move-fast prototyping startups, end up with it, I'm just very done onboarding to existing Rails codebases, personally, without some serious pain & suffering compensation.

[dham]

> If you're having to poke around in running code to find out WTF some symbol even is and where it comes from

I see this people complain about this but I don't understand why. First of all I've seen highly competent engineers complain about methods in Rails that exist from basic inheritance in Ruby. A concept that they probably learned when they were 10 years old. This is how object-oriented code is written. Pretty much every game is written the same way. Yes the dynamic methods that are generated can be annoying, but not what I see people complain about.

Second, they're trying to code a language like Ruby in a text editor and complain. If you tried to write Java or Scala in a text editor you would also have a bad time. So, yea I don't get it to be honest.