Every time I read that one of the “downsides” of RoR is that it “doesn’t sound cool” I know I’m in the right place! I’ll have mature teammates who understand the right tool for the right job. I won’t have to work with magpie developers with an acute case of not-invented-here syndrome. Granted Rails isn’t the answer to everything. I’ve been loving what we can accomplish with elixir/Phoenix. But I’ll leave the hipsteri…
Honest question: what leads you to believe that Ruby on Rails, or even Ruby, is the right tool for the right job? You didn't even mentioned the job, so why do you automatically assume Ruby is the right tool?
Additionally, by ignoring popularity you're also ignoring availability of documentation and examples and mindshare. You're also ignoring experience, and prior onboarding into a language stack, which automatically means odds are anyone onboarding into the project will quickly be up and running.
Speaking as someone who was forced to onboard into a Ruby project just because a predecessor jumped on the bandwagon, the experience was an unmitigated disaster. A minor onboarding task that consisted of tweaking a hard codes settin in a module required me and a couple of colleagues to spend a few days a) learning a brand new programming language, b) learning exotic frameworks, c) getting acquainted with idiomatic Ruby, d) learning how to troubleshoot and debug Ruby applications, e) properly setup a software dev environment, and f) finally fix the issue.
If my predecessor opted to use Python instead of succumbing to bandwagons and resume-driven development practices, the same thing would take a couple of man/hours.
How does can this sort of snafu pass off as the right tool for the right job?