Giles Bowkett: Rails Went Off The Rails

It’s fascinating to read Giles Bowkett on Rails, its bloat, its falling out of fashion.

Fascinating mainly because it so clearly highlights that no-one is immune from this life-cycle that goes :

  • new, simpler and easier than anything else
  • hot-new thing that everyone loves
  • adding more fluff to deal with more edge-cases
  • build-up of technical debt
  • re-writes to try to make more general, more principled, but requiring more configuration
  • old and bloated.
Certainly Python isn’t immune. We’ve been through this cycle with Zope, Plone … feels like Django has too. Java went through it several times. The node/js/coffeescript frameworks will go through it too. 
DOS/Windows did it. I guess the Macintosh OS has, though Apple have been more willing to kill and reboot its operating systems with the moves to OSX (BSD) and then iOS.


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