> I love how every time there is a post about Rails, someone preaches the holy grail of Elixir/Phoenix.
I can understand how you might feel that way. I tried to make clear that I don't think it's the perfect answer to everything forever, but to specify ways in which I've personally seen it as an improvement. And given that the OP is about the continued merits of Rails, don't you expect some commenters to express disagreement?
> the main thing that execs care about is the bottom line and how fast we can push products to production
True. But that matters not just on day 1 but for years to come. Sandi Metz in the Ruby community teaches that point well.
I've seen Rails patterns like ActiveRecord callbacks lead to buggy, confusing code, greatly hindering progress on feature work and requiring significant debugging effort.
Certainly lots of businesses have succeeded with Rails, and I've worked for some of them. Lots of businesses have succeeded with Python, Java, .NET, PHP, and Node, too. That in itself doesn't argue for which one to pick when starting a new project.
After experiencing difficulties with my Ruby tech stack, I started looking around, and Elixir is where I landed. At this point I'm invested and biased, just as the OP is. But bouncing back and forth between the languages recently has confirmed for me that I prefer Elixir for the reasons I gave above.
> To any young devs out there, I strongly encourage you to not pick a framework by its hype but evaluate it based on your system needs / maturity.
I'd suggest young devs pick tools based at least partly on job postings, and on that measure, Rails will win by a landslide. But keep your ear to the ground. When I started as a developer, I was using PHP, but I kept hearing how Rails was better. Learning it and moving to work in it was a great career move for me.
Something will come after Rails. Something will come after Phoenix. There will always be a new something. Don't get too caught up in the hype, but don't get too attached to your current tools, either.
I can understand how you might feel that way. I tried to make clear that I don't think it's the perfect answer to everything forever, but to specify ways in which I've personally seen it as an improvement. And given that the OP is about the continued merits of Rails, don't you expect some commenters to express disagreement?
> the main thing that execs care about is the bottom line and how fast we can push products to production
True. But that matters not just on day 1 but for years to come. Sandi Metz in the Ruby community teaches that point well.
I've seen Rails patterns like ActiveRecord callbacks lead to buggy, confusing code, greatly hindering progress on feature work and requiring significant debugging effort.
Certainly lots of businesses have succeeded with Rails, and I've worked for some of them. Lots of businesses have succeeded with Python, Java, .NET, PHP, and Node, too. That in itself doesn't argue for which one to pick when starting a new project.
After experiencing difficulties with my Ruby tech stack, I started looking around, and Elixir is where I landed. At this point I'm invested and biased, just as the OP is. But bouncing back and forth between the languages recently has confirmed for me that I prefer Elixir for the reasons I gave above.
> To any young devs out there, I strongly encourage you to not pick a framework by its hype but evaluate it based on your system needs / maturity.
I'd suggest young devs pick tools based at least partly on job postings, and on that measure, Rails will win by a landslide. But keep your ear to the ground. When I started as a developer, I was using PHP, but I kept hearing how Rails was better. Learning it and moving to work in it was a great career move for me.
Something will come after Rails. Something will come after Phoenix. There will always be a new something. Don't get too caught up in the hype, but don't get too attached to your current tools, either.