[riffraff]

Because people have a limited appetite for complexity.

I wrote some front-end stuff back in the days but I've lost track of whatever is happening these days. jQuery to append some stuff took five minutes to learn, but learning react hooks takes a determined effort.

Likewise, adding a field to a graphql type is simple, but doing it with authorization, controlling n+1s, adding tests etc.. requires front-end folks to actually invest time in learning whatever back-end they're dealing with this time.

Everything is just a lot more complicated these days, and if you've been around for a while you may not be excited anymore by the churn, but rather fed up.

[jack_riminton]

This is why the Rails community should be applauded in my book, for their dogged determination that we should keep it a “one person” framework. Yes it may not be as performant, type safe or flashy on the front end but my god it’s productive.

At my startup there are 7 devs who can all do tickets across the stack and as we grow I think it would be good if we could resist the pressure to silo and specialize

[ethagnawl]

> but my god it’s productive.

It really is. Regrettably, I've drifted away from it in large part because of client requirements for more "modern" and "maintainable" solutions (e.g. Python or Node; I'll take Python every time, thanks). Django comes very close in terms of productivity (and is better in some ways: auth, admin, etc.) but the Rails CLI, generators and community (not sure if this is still relevant) give it the edge.

The "recent" (last 10+ years) movement towards "lightweight" libraries (instead of frameworks) that require you to either reinvent the wheel, copy-and-paste or use some random "getting-started" template every time you start a new project is disheartening. As others have said above, I think it's partially resume-driven-development and people wanting to tinker (both of which I do appreciate).

Something which continues to surprise me is that there hasn't really been a "modern" successor to Rails. Granted, I haven't kept pace with developments in the Node/TypeScript world but, last time I looked, Sails was on the right track but wasn't very actively developed and I was shot down (in favor of Express spaghetti) when I suggested it. There's also a smattering of Rust web frameworks but none that quite fit the bill and come with all of the batteries and opinions included. I keep saying I'm going to do a Summer of Code project which attempts this but ... life.

[mike_hearn]

There are some Java frameworks that are kinda similar? Take a look at Micronaut for example. It has data access interfaces that use ActiveRecord's naming approach, controllers, view renderers, and a whole lot more on top.

[ethagnawl]

Thanks. I'll take a look. Didn't mean to overlook Java, I'm just less familiar with that environment. I've dabbled with some JVM languages and could also see Kotlin being a very nice option for such a framework. Though, to be fair, I know Java has come a long way in terms of expressivity, syntactic sugar, etc. (better performance is a given).

[mike_hearn]

You can use such frameworks from kotlin too, they have full support.

[GreenWatermelon]

There's no modern successor to Rails because Rails itself os still modern and very much up to date. The recent introduction of Stimulus allows to implement a SPA completely on rails (if they wanted) with the same simplicity present everywhere else in the framework.

[ethagnawl]

I don't agree with much of this but it's timely: https://zenstack.dev/blog/js-fullstack