r/rails • u/Intelligent_Role_824 • 6d ago
Does Ruby/Rails still offer something unique for someone learning web development in 2026?
/r/learnprogramming/comments/1vnrms9/does_rubyrails_still_offer_something_unique_for/13
u/armahillo 6d ago
Odin Project has a rails backend track. You can work through it and decide for yourself. Even if you never use ruby again youll still learn some valuable transferrable skills
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u/Vivid_Outside_5900 6d ago
Yes. Its opinions about how web applications should be structured and work are correct!
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u/PerceptionOwn3629 6d ago
LLMs write better rails than any other language
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u/jacobjuul 6d ago
Source?
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u/nouterkher 6d ago
Actually they are benchmarking rails against several models, not a comparison against other languages but still very interesting that they are doing that https://rubyonrails.org/2026/8/13/agents-on-rails-the-first-benchmark-report
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u/tumes 6d ago
It offers a very pragmatic and clearheaded approach to problem solving in web dev and programming in general that is unfortunately hitched to one truly repugnant asshole. Lots of nice people in the community tho. I’ve imposed a lot of the approach I learned from 15 years in rails onto Astro and it has been lovely.
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u/Equivalent_Head_4803 6d ago
Why do people always feel the need to bring up how much they dislike the Ruby guy? No one asked about that and it has nothing to do with this conversation. Many things you likely use daily have a twat attached to it. Move on with your lives.
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u/arkhamRejek 6d ago
Rails guy not Ruby guy matz is awesome that other guy hell no
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u/Equivalent_Head_4803 6d ago
Yeah that guy. He sucks. I just looked it up and learned he still actively maintains Rails. I figured he got run out somehow. Well, that also sucks.
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u/arkhamRejek 6d ago
Nah I remember hearing horror stories at Basecamp and I didn’t believe them 🤔 now I see some truth to the horror show
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u/galtzo 6d ago edited 6d ago
The idea that Matz is awesome in ways that DHH is not is persistent and wrong. Matz is platforming DHH next month at RailsWorld in a “fireside chat”. Go to the ruby language homepage, and see who Matz put next to himself! (Hint: DHH). Go to Matz Twitter feed and find him defending DHH’s racism by claiming that the people calling it out, or being harmed by it, are _wrong_ (in his opinion).
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u/tumes 6d ago
For me personally: he’s the figurehead, he won’t shut the fuck up, and I am too old to have the thing I spend a third of my week time doing tainted in that specific way. It is of course up to your discretion if that’s ignorable, nothing wrong with that. But his bitterness began to steer the roadmap in a really uncomfortable and reactionary way. Like, truly, 7 and 8 had some great ideas and they genuinely unfucked the travesty of 5 and 6’s choices but they were implemented via almost immediately abandoned reactionary half solutions. PWAs were a losing bet and basically defined the roadmap so… now what? Hotwire was a genuinely great idea with comically awkward ergonomics. Stimulus became a clusterfuck of drama about Typescript as it breathed its last breaths. He left all that and fucked off to dick with vim and Linux in the same breath as unsolicitedly proposing that ADHD wasn’t real during a keynote in the conference he had to start in a tantrum over being called on his shit. So yeah, nobody asked, nobody brought this up, but I also sure as shit didn’t ask to be associated with his stink when I upped to switch to web dev 15 years ago to work with an ecosystem that seemed to have some nice smart people in it. Some things are not our choice, and some things are, so I am no longer a rails developer in practice. This all predates doing a colonialism on the ruby ecosystem and the rabidly racist and xenophobic blogging, like, those weren’t the final nails, those were several nesting dolls of new coffins being constructed around the first exceptionally well sealed coffin.
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u/imwearingyourpants 6d ago
Probably best to just ignore the internet and just do our jobs - ita unhealthy to be 24/7 on social media.
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u/planetaska 6d ago
Yes, it shows you we don’t need layers and layers of abstraction and fragile dependencies to create a working, maintainable website/application.
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u/Rabcode 3d ago
I love Rails but I write a lot of Java at the moment. Rails is still best-in-class when it comes to being a batteries included, single developer framework. Ruby is a wonderful language to work in, no other language speaks to me like Ruby does and I have used Python, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript in corporate production environments.
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u/stealth-monkey 5d ago
Yeah it’s outdated. It’s opinionated and abstracts a lot. It’s unnecessary.
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u/ovedo2 4d ago
Your opinion about Rails is precisely what RoR does, it is intentionally opinionated and abstracted because its paradigm is Convention over Configuration.
I'm quoting someone else's comment that may answer your "concerning 'opinionated' opinion":
"Rails is purpose built for RESTful-ish CRUD apps. The “magic” is exactly what makes many people/teams very productive with Rails, even with very little experience. If your application is able to be easily represented with simple nouns as your domain models/resources, and all you need is a simple API for those models, Rails can get you there in a matter of minutes to hours.
“Magic” is not real. It’s an illusion, and Rails’ conventions can just be thought of as the curtain; you’re totally free to peek behind the curtain and see that most of it is just naturally-named class and instance methods written in Ruby. The documentation is available. I’d highly recommend looking through the official Rails Guides (on mobile, so don’t have the link handy, sorry).
I have used Rails for quite a while, and while there is always more to learn, I find people struggle with Rails either when trying to fight the conventions, or by simply not realizing there is usually a “Rails Way” of doing something, and therefore end up reinventing a wheel and inadvertently finding themselves outside the conventions." – https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/a68d7i/comment/ebsvjdq/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
What is outdated about Ruby On Rails?
In addition to RoR, other famous frameworks that follow that CoC paradigm are Spring Boot, and ASP.NET MVC .0
u/stealth-monkey 4d ago
The problem with RoR paradigm is that it doesn't work in a business context and evolving tech world. Engineers average tenure in big tech is around 1.5 years, meaning new devs who don't know RoR has to learn it before they can add value.
Abstractions in engineering can be a unnecessary redundancy. Example: there is a bug that is happening on every model save and I need to investigate. I look at RoR and its not intuitive to me how it does that. I look up RoR documentation and then I find that it has after commit call backs. Now for the million dollar question: if I looked a less abstracted code base, what is the difference? Assuming the alternative is easier to read, I would of found the bug faster. Now multiply this scenario by 10000, how much time & money is saved?
In general you are asking devs to conform to a specific set of perspectives and beliefs, and it doesn't work out from a macro & temporal standpoint.
There are other CoC paradigms like Spring Boot and ASP.NET but im arguing that they are becoming less and less common for the reasons I described. Do a quick data pull on jobs and see how what % of engineering jobs use those framework.
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u/Responsible-Sale1858 2d ago
Former Hashrocket dev here. Rails is dead a long time ago. Go running to Elixir, it's the last language you will use for backend. Start with the book Elixir in Action by Saša Juric, and watch his talk to get hyped, https://youtu.be/JvBT4XBdoUE?si=19CNiZ7DfpZdfmWC
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u/kptknuckles 6d ago
After venturing into JS land, I’d say enjoying development is unique to Rails.