Ask HN: In 2016, will Rails & Django be competitive against newer technologies?

The framework choice is not an independent evaluation, you have to take into consideration the accumulated experience level of prospective engineers you can grab within your reach. That's why actually all of the mentioned frameworks will be alive and going. It is increasingly hard to go exotic, if you are thinking of growth and agility. Otherwise you can paint yourself into a corner where recruitment is impossible and a big rewrite is inevitable.

I've said this before here, but to me Django occupies a very different place from a lot of the more recently developed frameworks. And as lame as it sounds, a big part of it is in the large, complicated content-heavy site (go figure, it was developed in a newspaper environment).

Sure, Django can be used to build single page sites and flow-heavy web apps. But that's not its strength. Just as you end up having to do a lot of custom programming to make Meteor or Node/Derby work for a site with 15 different content types and multiple backend administrators, but that's not their strength.

Note, I'm a complete newbie. I spent 12 months doing a Django job, and started a Rails job about ~4 months ago. Before that I followed frameworks but wasn't nearly as engaged.

The impression I get, is that in general, these languages and frameworks will age, get boring, and eventually be something used because of legacy, the existing codebases. Is this bad? Of course not! It means there will always be a wealth of well-documented, high quality software to work with.

But really, the only way to fight off not being 'boring' is by trying to always do the brand new technologies, always having a way of implementing them. Rails with Turbolinks, to pseudo-mimic frontend JS frameworks. Rails also implementing server side events, moving web sockets closer to 'the norm'.

Will they still be the hot go-to languages/frameworks 5-10 years from now? Probably not. Rails will probably feel then like PHP does now('old and safe', with better options available for most cases), and something like Go or some other incredibly thin means of maintaining a backend API to facilitate frontend Javascript frameworks. And after that, who knows. Maybe the web as pages will die 10-15 years from now, instead being replaced by something more akin to a pluggable game or OS engine. Maybe holograms. Maybe we just get robots and call it a day.

I enjoy the Indeed.com job trends for this sort of thing: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=ruby%2C+python%2C+php%2C+n...

I'm a Ruby/Rails developer (and I run MemphisRuby) and while I seriously enjoy working with Rails I don't expect it to be as popular ten years from now.

Rails is still tremendously good at what it does and I don't think it's likely that another framework or language is going to beat it at its own game. The real question is whether or not the things that Rails does best will continue to be important in the marketplace.

We've already seen parts of Rails's core competencies carved out by other tools: Erlang/Node/Go enable saner async programming. Backbone/Angular/Ember enable rich web applications. Scala/Clojure/Go/etc. on the "fast compiled backend services" front. Even PHP is keeping pace with the times (Composer, Laravel) just enough to keep its adherents from having a real reason to jump ship.

Ruby and Rails are still pretty much as good as it gets for rapid development of web applications (the backend parts of MVC, anyway), and there's a growing Ruby niche for configuration management (Chef, Puppet, etc).

Personally I find my investment in learning and working with Ruby has been a great way for me to experience a much wider variety of technologies and architectures than I would have otherwise. Thanks to Rails work I've learned tons about AMQP, Postgres, Chef, Backbone, JavaScript, CSS, Ansible, DNS (bind), and more that I just wouldn't have had the same exposure to in a slower-paced development environment.

Your ending line about "still in wide use but not frequently selected for the best new projects" is a bit complicated. Certainly any language stays in wide use once it falls out of fashion and its projects categorically move to the "legacy" phase, but "best new projects" is a bit much. A lot of what we might think of as the 'best' projects are driven by fashion just as much as technical merits.

I think one notable thing to observe with any of these frameworks is that backends as REST APIs with a javascript heavy front end are becoming more common.

Many of these frameworks won't disappear but I think adapt to the newer trends.

Whether we like it or not java is still here and used, I don't see why rails and django won't be.

The whole point of software is it evolves. These projects both have enough of a following to receive updates to fit those new paradigms.

They may not be as suited for something built from the ground up for that specific use case, but that doesn't mean they will disappear.