Existential crisis at Railsconf

would you move to java? that's older and even less shiny.

This. We didn't feel comfortable moving my company to Rails until it hit version 3. Maturity is a good thing.

Is this just a really polite, introspective take on (Rails|Ruby) is a Ghetto? I can't point out one really valid critique in this entire rant. While I imagine that you've had enough kool-aid to actually believe the things you said, I think you should probably do a few google searches to find out how many shops are hiring Rails devs versus Clojure or Elixir. You can do more experimenting by seeing who else is actually working those jobs, what kind of professional experience they have, and if you're really lucky figure out what they get paid.

Rails needs websockets, just like years ago when it needed a better way to handle organizing and deploying assets. The modern application demands it, and if you've ever had the pleasure of trying to build a websocket application in Ruby you'd understand why it's actually really exciting that we're going to get the Rails community to build this for all of us.

If you want to be disenchanted about some aspect of Rails then pick the fact that the need for diversity at RailsConf this year has yielded some of the worst presentations I've ever seen (like, literally, the presenter spoke poor/broken english and the Docker oriented talks were about 6 months behind).

Rails moves the way it does and absorbs the ideas it does because they become popular. It's much easier to add a feature that everyone wants, instead of inventing a feature that makes a solved problem that much easier/faster/what-have-you. DHH seems to have to explain this every few years, but go back in time when Rails adopted sprockets and you'll see posts not unlike the one you just wrote.

Realistically, Ruby and Rails jobs are still among the highest paying in the industry. Startups and other more established companies still choose Rails as their platform, and not just for bullshit brochure sites. Certainly there remains a "best tool for the job" mentality but, right now, the alternatives are to: build it yourself, hop on a less "mature" framework -- Pheonix? I don't even know what you pick when you adopt Elixir as your platform language and need to build an API or front end apps but Pheonix won the google -- or choose from one of the popular technologies like Express.js, Laravel(?), or Django. That part of building technology (and business) didn't change, and there are still hundreds of thousands of Ruby and Rails engineers out there.

The Rails team, including DHH, owes us nothing. They aren't required to give us a framework of our choosing, they're the ones building it! Just like we don't owe anything to Rails!

DHH uses Rails for Basecamp, so it makes sense that he'll lead the project towards the goals of BC.

I understand that there's not quite the same consistent 'theme' this year, but I'm not sure that's concordant with developers who are using Rails 'abandoning' it or anything like that.

It's true that real-time operations like websockets are a total pain in the arse with Rails. Nobody's yet figured out an optimal solution for that sort of thing, and maybe ActionCable is a good solution.

The thing is that while some demands on the web stack have changed, a lot of it is still pretty similar. We have HTTP requests, and HTML, and assets, and databases. It might turn out that Rails can also perform some other tasks that require realtime operation. Or maybe it won't be able to, and we'll be able to use some other tools.

Ultimately, we're still using Rails for all of our new web apps. We've tried loads of different toolsets, but haven't found an alternative that's compelling enough to bother. So YMMV, but the fact that Rails is maybe a bit less exciting that newer frameworks doesn't mean it's not great to use any more.