While I've done a lot of work in .NET and PHP, I've used Rails as my go-to tool for over 10 years, since early 2.x days. I got moved into a new role at the beginning of the year. I was in the middle of rewriting yet another legacy Java web app in Rails. Some jerks got involved, and I was told that I could no longer use Rails because I was the "only one" in my 38K-employee company that used it. I said that Rails was the most productive thing I've seen in programming in 15 years, and asked why in the world "we" wouldn't hire for that skillset. We "moved on" in the meeting.
Predictably, I was forced into using "Java" for my current project. After some experiments with Grails, I settled on Spring Boot, and Angular. However, I'm stuck trying to build a CRUD page with a dropdown list of options for a nested, associated model. There's no example of nested models in the official docs, and every tutorial on the internet 1) wants to spam me about emails, books, and classes, and 2) stops short of showing an actual, working example an editing component with a nested model. Combine this with the fact that searching for anything on the stack leads to examples from AngularJS 1.x, 2, 4, 5, and 6, and now they've just released 7. And even if you stick to the 2+ series, you have NgForm, Reactive, and Dynamic templates to sort thought.
If you'd have asked me if I thought finding good examples of this would be easy before I started, I would have called you crazy for suggesting that it would not have been. Yet, here I am, months into this project, and it's a daily struggle to find good examples of some of the most basic things I took for granted in Rails. Just yesterday, I found a SO Q/A that spoke exactly to the situation I'm trying to code at the moment, and the very-highly-upvoted solution simply does. not. work. At this point, I still don't know why.
I sat down the other night while I watched a movie, and got more done in Rails -- just for the fun of it -- in a couple hours than I've gotten done with Spring/Angular in a couple weeks. You want a dropdown list of associated models in an edit page in Rails? That's, like, 1 line of code in 3 source files, and you can find examples of it in the official docs, and hundreds of good web pages about it. In Spring/Angular, I need a dozen more source files to describe the interfaces and objects to the compiler, setup repositories and controllers, models and components, and THEN write the template.
There's absolutely no comparison in development velocity between Rails and Java, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise. I could have had a working site up and running in Rails in the time it has taken me to bootstrap a development environment and get some models created in Java. (Manifestly not true, but that's how it FEELS at the moment.) I'm wondering what I'm missing. How is this the stack that seems to have absolutely captivated online discussion of programming for the past couple years? Maybe Angular WITHOUT Spring is really great?
My personal belief is that, just like some people gravitate to Windows, and some to Mac(Linux/Unix), there are people who just _like_ how Java works, and some who like Rails. Some people like to specify absolutely everything in code, and some people like letting the framework do the boring parts for them.
The bottom line is that I still don't know what stack can even hold a candle to the productivity of Rails.