At Simple Thread we have worked with a lot of different languages and stacks. We’ve worked with Ruby, Python, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, Elixir, Obje

Why We Depend on Rails for Many Projects

submited by

Style Pass

2022-05-16 12:30:05

At Simple Thread we have worked with a lot of different languages and stacks. We’ve worked with Ruby, Python, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, Elixir, Objective-C, PHP, and many more. We believe strongly in using the right tool for the job. One of the tools that we feel like is often a great fit for new applications is Rails, which tends to surprise some software engineers that we interact with.

This topic became top of mind for me recently because there was another post on Hacker News about whether or not Rails was still relevant. It comes up quite frequently, and with good reason. When deciding to build a system, matching up the framework with the goals of the project are critical. Reading through the comments on HN it was, as always, a mixture of comments ranging from “Rails is the greatest of all time!” to “I worked on a Rails app, and it was terrible, Rails is terrible.”

While I agree with all of those things, these alone would never be enough to keep me in the ecosystem and certainly wouldn’t convince me to join the ecosystem. If there was a newer equivalent to Rails in a more popular ecosystem we would happily explore it and use it where it made sense, but after a lot of searching I don’t think we are there yet. You might be reading that and thinking: “you idiot, there are a ton of modern Rails equivalents in other ecosystems!”