The thing that drives me nuts about Rails is that the conventions I learned everywhere else break down. There's no goto-definition that works in any sane way, I'm left `ag`ing through the codebase for `def whatever`. The amount of stuff I have to keep in my head to understand what any given object is doing (due to magic) is nuts and exhausting at times.
The general impression I get from Rails and Ruby is a desire to be lexographically terse: fewer characters on screen per unit of business logic. On the one hand, you can fit a lot of code in view at once, which has it's benefits. On the other hand, you're sacrificing explicit data for that terseness, and you have to fall back to holding state in your head.
Without a doubt, Rails is powerful, and there's a lot I've loved about working in the ecosystem, but there's very significant tradeoffs to doing things the Rails way.
I think the key is that ruby is good for kickstarting a business and getting it to a state where the business runs with high execution speed and minimal effort.
Once the business is operational and stable then continuing from there is bad. Usually you will have to change the entire stack and of course from certain perspectives this can be seen as a lack of foresight.
But if you chose to use another technology to start it could be that the speed of execution just wasn't fast enough and your business never reaches that island of stability because the technology just wasn't fast enough.
Communities for RoR or Microsoft MVC could have created templates for all kinds of applications, and parameters with best-practice implementations of useful stuff like "jwt webtoken" could have been added and maybe implemented to work across different application templates?
Maybe there are good reasons why this is not feasible on a fundamental, technical level, but maybe that's just a path not travelled, as the open source spirit fizzled out and people tried for their own unicorn app.
At the end of the day every client/company has their own special requirements so going with a framework that speeds that process up without the pain of a generic system is where it is at.
I cringe when I hear stories of new teams trying to move off Rails into something like Wordpress.
Template out your app, create the pieces through wizards, reduce developer need to interact with the underlying tech and make complicated choices in favor of best practice defaults.
It was... mostly horrible (and I think this pain is where RoR is right now). The problem is that templates go stale awfully fast, tech changes, best practices change, good defaults change.
Keeping a coherent codebase where the developers don't have an understanding of the choices that have been made is recipe for disaster. It always ends up mattering, because often best practices depend on top level objectives and aren't objectively correct, but rather trade-offs.
RoR does what the author needs - it quickly bootstraps a tech company. The trade-off is that it sucks so hard in year 5.
You get an easy start and a miserable middle. That's probably a trade most startups should make, but as a person who has to inherit that junk... Wow is it painful.
I wonder how people don't understand the codebases they inherit to be honest.
