[joedoe55555]

My experience is similar. Sinatra is great for one-man-shows or really simple REST apis. For the rest, forget about it...

However, Rails is just too fng complex. It's true what they're saying, Rails-only programmers aren't necessarily Ruby programmers. For a good reason, even the simplest tasks are performed with Rails metaprogramming magic behind the scenes. Idiomatic Rails programming actually means not doing imperative programming which sucks. Programmers want to actually know and control what they are doing.

I once dealt with a legacy Rails app that had really complex Models. ("Fat models, thin controllers") Of course the original designers hadn't thought about every corner case, and of course not thought about what AR is actually able to deal with seriously. The app was just slow and not maintainable.

But to say something good about Rails: creating standard web pages with it is a peace of cake. All standard tasks are automatized.

Great when building but it sucks when debugging and maintaining.

[protobluffers]

The more abstraction you shove down the programmer's throat, the less he will understand what's really going on behind the scenes. Eventually the abstractions become more of an impediment than a panacea, e.g. when you try to do simple things. And we also end up with the creation of "leaky abstractions", since programmers who create them have developed a love for abstraction (what might contribute to that?) but little understanding of the lower levels.

There was a recent post on HN regarding /usr/local that seemed to suggest some programmers do not understand what a partition is nor should they need to become acquainted with such unimportant details. I hope I'm wrong in that interpretation. Because if true, that is just sad.

[codenerdz]

Do you think that a "legacy" Node(or Sinatra for that matter) app will be easier to understand than a "legacy" Rails app? Legacy is where conventions actually shine!