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whstl • today at 11:53 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

It's kind of crazy to witness.

Rails is very insular tech.

A lot of people bet their entire careers on Rails. I've worked on Rails shops, and the majority of developers have not touched another language in years. There are people who never shipped anything in anything but Rails, and haven't done anything in other language since college, or ever if they did a bootcamp.

I have even interviewed a significant number of people doing Rails for ten years who did not know it was possible to launch a Ruby application with `ruby script.rb`.

Not to mention that with the emergence of frontend frameworks, most Rails developers were doing API-only stuff, and barely interacted with the frontend.

I recently left a company that was moving to from Rails to Go (might have been partially my fault), and there were was a bit of a mutiny where several teams have refused to change languages.

DHH is pretty much saying AI is gonna eat this people alive.


Replies

jdkoeck • today at 9:43 PM

Rails is the most cult-like, anti-learning, anti-choice and even anti-engineering technology I have ever used. It does NOT want you to make your own choices, it does NOT want you to decouple from the framework, it does NOT want you to grow. It’s frightening.

I mean, in an app that uses Rails by-the-book, you won’t even find a class instantiation. No call to new. You won’t find a class that does not inherit from a framework bass class either. The framework handles everything, don’t worry.

bigfishrunning • today at 6:54 PM

These people who refer to them selves as a "Rails Engineer" (or substitute any other language/framework) and fail to realize that there are other tools in the box are of course first against the wall in the AI-driven future.

A carpenter who only knows how to use a hammer isn't a very good carpenter.

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