Dear fellow readers. You are on a Rails app.

1. israilsdead.com/

2. This is an incredibly well written article and you are to be commended. It’s hilarious that I detailed in length my intention to write an article with the same name but decided to do it tomorrow which I’m happy about bc this is much more in-depth than my outline.

3. The is Rails dead question imo exists in 2021 because we joke about it without realizing others don’t know it’s a joke. What’s incredibly unfortunate about this is some people will never get to experience it because of that and because junior developers are paying the price by being told by their mentors that rails isn’t a viable option. We can and need to do better.

Rails is undeniably getting hot again. Some, myself included, lovingly call it a Renaissance. But the bottom line is if we don’t want Rails to die we need to be empowering the next generation of developers and helping them find work and advocating for them at our companies.

Whether Rails will die or not depends on whether we start making sure it doesn’t. And if we don’t, we are murdering Rails all by ourself.

Again this was phenomenal. Thanks for a great read.

Thank you for this nicely wrapped present to Rails and Ruby.

One aspect can be added to the mix: Every existing and new web framework steals something from Rails. So Rails’ genes are selected for the next Darwinian cycles whatever happens to the original Rails.

I had to suffer some Spring in 2010, and again in 2015. Starting a Spring project in 2015 was “new” and structured very much like a Rails project. Same with the Play framework on Scala, down to the project file structure and some configuration. I cite here only 2 frameworks, but this impression of “déjà vu in Rails” just comes back over and over. And, well, I started web development in Ruby with a framework called Merb, which should give a hint I joined Rails from 3.0, and reveal my age.

Coupled with the excellent points in the article, I say to new comers to at least have a look at Rails. It is so easy and comfortable to start with, and allows building the best foundation for web development, one can retrieve in every major framework now.

When everyone copies you one way or the other, you’re doing something “right”.

Ah, still remember when RoR was the "cool kid", when the internet started hating PHP.

Now both are considered "dead" lol. I think that´s good sign for RoR. It´s a sign of maturity and stability!

Great post, kudos. Sadly, the people who would learn the most from it are so hardened and tribal that to click is to admit the possibility of being wrong. And we all know that there's nothing worse than an insecure person being wrong.

Some additional perspective from someone who has been in this from the beginning: before "is it dead?" was "but does it scale?", but before even that there was "this is a toy that's can't hit critical mass". This FUD was largely coming from Java developers (DHH always called them "enterprise astronauts", which made me giggle every time) who were rightfully deeply threatened by how easy it was to stand up a production ready app with Rails; ActiveRecord in particular was described in unflattering terms.

In reality, if Twitter was starting from scratch today, I would definitely use Rails again. The problem was that they were literally doing MySQL joins to push out tweets to (at the time) giant audiences. I feel that if they had a chance for a do-over, knowing what they know today, they would have started out with a clear intention to divide the messaging infrastructure and the front-end from the very beginning, and things would turn out very differently.

Anyhow, there's two excellent links that you should add to your list. You might have seen the Rails Doctrine. It's a long read but a poignant one, and worth revisiting every few years.

It's less likely that you've seen DHH's RailsConf 2008 keynote talk, "The Great Surplus". To me, this is the key moment where he broke down every aspect of why the whole "is rails dead" thing isn't just moot, it's a way that we can enjoy massive advantages over our competitors. It's a 100% must-see, at least once.

The ruby community would do well to act more like the php community in this regard - literally just stop caring if others think your tech is "dead" or not. Facebook and Wordpress run on php and I don't see the php community up in arms that php is not as cool as elixir.

Who cares! Just keep writing ruby and enjoy life!

Unpopular opinion judging by the rest of the comments, but I really dislike Ruby syntax and I don't like some of the "magic" elements of Rails that are sometimes challenging to trace precisely what is going on. And the bundler is cumbersome and frustrating at times. I did however find Rails to be quite fast at processing queries which renders my gripes less relevant.

And while I'm at it:

• Java: I hate it.
• PHP: I don't like the syntax either, it can be very hard to read.
• Go: Premise is good, but cumbersome, especially the endless error handling. Also quite rigid with the strong typing which most probably consider a feature.
• Python: I love the syntax, dislike the performance. If Flask was a performant as Rails that would be the winner for me.
• Node: As performant as the single thread async stuff is, I find you spend all your time making the request handling synchronous. I also hate curly brackets, I prefer ident based code.

Talking about scaling/performance. I wonder what everybody uses to run their Ruby application.
The standard CRuby doesn't have the best performance.

Folks used to say that PHP was dying when I got into the industry (way back when Amazon only sold books). Today it is still the most widely used language on the web. It's still a pretty big part of a tiny niche website called "facebook".

Most of the time when you hear "yeah but language X is dying," it is being said by an engineer with very little experience who is really just saying "language X is from before I started programming, and I never learned it, so it must not matter." Which is, for obvious reasons, not a great framework for evaluating relevance.

Nice article. I always kind of laugh when people call certain things dead or dying because it is very subjective and typically overstated. What is ironic to me is many 'dead' languages and frameworks are still deployed and need maintenance ou there in the world. I use deprecated /dead frameworks/protocols/language versions frequently because large enterprises can be very slow to move or not have proper motivation to migrate. Perhaps not as popular or hyped these days (RoR) I still believe it will be around for a long time and always remain a viable option.

"Rails doesn't scale to Twitter's size so why use it?"

Come back when you have an app at Twitter's size :D

Yet to find a framework that's as productive as Rails.

I just started learning Ruby and Rails 3 months ago, and I've been loving it every since. I decided to commit to learning it because there are tons of rails jobs in the United States.

Good article. In the last several months I've been learning rails exclusively, and started building my first major project on it 3 weeks ago or so. Rails is definitely not dead 😂

Well written, entertaining read. Also helpful as I'm the developer you speculate for in this article. Thanks.

Rails being dead is a myth. But it still builds the mythical unicorns. See G2.com which was built on RoR from the start. Love that the Rails community is still so strong!