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Not if you want to make building websites complex so that you can charge your client more.
Its a good point, there are absolutely much more simpler frameworks out there, which are good for your own side projects, your own large projects, and what fun and exciting production companies are using.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That post seems extremely suspect. I'm guessing that what they mean when they say "the most in demand skills" is the skills that when present on a resume, increase the odds of a user being contacted by recruiters, which isn't so much in demand as hard to find. By that metric COBOL would probably have been at the top of the list if hired had clients that used it.
Do you have any evidence at all to support this or is it just a guess?
I prefer the “explicit is better than implicit” norm in the Python community over the “powerful yet mystifying magic” I find in Rails. (This is personal preference.)
I also appreciate Python source code being easier to manipulate with tools than Ruby, since Ruby did not have a formal grammar the last time I checked. Any tools that did exist appeared to usually include the yacc/bison file from MRI (the main Ruby implementation) as the best approximation of a language definition.
Ruby has been on the downswing for a while, getting squeezed from all sides from the meteoric rise of Python on one side, JS/Typescript on the other, to higher performing static languages on another: https://octoverse.github.com/#top-languages-over-the-years It also has a funky syntax, while not a big deal, doesn't do it any favors in a C --> Javascript world. Django, golang, etc. are free. I don't recommend starting…
I had a couple die hard rails members at my last company who claimed nothing was better. We made them write Go for a year and now they are die hard Go fans.
If I were writing a web app I would start with Go. It’s a great language that’s easy to learn and fast to write, with all the security of static compilation. It scales exceptionally well with large teams
I had a call with a recruiter a few months back who said that the highest commissions were for Rails devs.
This would seem to indicate it is hard to find Rails devs, which itself might indicate devs don't like Ruby/Rails. If devs liked it and the market was growing as fast as devs were learning or slower, then commissions would stagnate or go down. So either the number of open jobs is increasing, devs are leaving, it's harder to learn than the sales pitch indicates, or a combination.
We're still starting new greenfield projects in Rails every week, and I still believe it's the best foundation for SaaS products. It's great for developer speed and efficiency, the ecosystem of gems is amazing, and we've been able to scale every project we've needed to. We're incorporating React and GraphQL more these days for complex components and APIs but they pair nicely with Rails.
If you’re face deep in the Ruby ecosystem then I’m sure it makes sense, but trying to build services alongside it is truly awful.
You want a scalable system that’s easy to write and will grow with you? Write basic Go services.
I had a call with a recruiter a few months back who said that the highest commissions were for Rails devs.
This would seem to indicate it is hard to find Rails devs, which itself might indicate devs don't like Ruby/Rails. If devs liked it and the market was growing as fast as devs were learning or slower, then commissions would stagnate or go down. So either the number of open jobs is increasing, devs are leaving, it's harder to learn than the sales pitch indicates, or a combination.
All my peers who started their careers with Rails that know it like the back of their hands have zero desire to ever work with it again professionally. They're all exceptional engineers who had no problems picking up/migrating to Scala/Rust without productivity loss.
On the other side, I see all the upcoming engineers that missed the initial Rails popularity wave. To them, Rails is often times much more frustrating than TS/Python offerings. There's very little freely available quality onboarding materials, getting the environment set up is incredibly frustrating with how fickle bundler has become, and deployments are still complicated.
My take is Rails is good for those who already know Rails, since the stability of it lets seasoned Rails developers carry forward all their experience. But for someone without that history, TS/Python frameworks offer a much faster/smoother onboarding process, especially with the massive familiarity advantage devs already have with Python/JS from schooling/web.
If you're going to go out of the way to learn a new language, why would you learn one that occupies the same space as one you already know?
I had a call with a recruiter a few months back who said that the highest commissions were for Rails devs.
This would seem to indicate it is hard to find Rails devs, which itself might indicate devs don't like Ruby/Rails. If devs liked it and the market was growing as fast as devs were learning or slower, then commissions would stagnate or go down. So either the number of open jobs is increasing, devs are leaving, it's harder to learn than the sales pitch indicates, or a combination.
If the above is correct, it presents an interesting question to junior engineers: is it worth it to learn Ruby on Rails as a junior engineer? While there are advantages to learning Rails (it's heavily opinionated, what you learn maps very well to what professional projects look like), there is more job supply in the "python + LeetCode" path (how that relates to competition - who knows).
There are much better options, but some people just like the crap they know