[mattgreenrocks]

I think Rails is wonderful, but it's not for me. It's explicitly designed to shut down many design decisions because they were made a priori by DHH. Don't want to co-mingle persistence and domain modeling? Too bad! Tie yourself to the ship and get on with it!

I realized the other day that Rails is designed for Internet time: ship as fast as possible, see if it sticks. If it does, then needing to re-write every few years is assumed to be no big deal, as, presumably, it is succeeding.

I view rewrites as a fundamental failure of design. I should be able to evolve the domain model independently of the UI. Only when there are massive, breaking changes in the scope of the application ("we're going to sell video games instead of show classifieds!") is a rewrite truly necessary.

But, IMO, industry hates design because it alludes to the fact that programmers are not easily replaceable. So, it pushes a new framework or language every 2 years to keep people hopping around, solving the same problem over and over. Meanwhile, it fails to train those people in the (mostly timeless) ways of solving problems reliably. And devs lap it up, secretly hoping it will fix all those icky maintenance problems they're starting to run into.