Ask HN: DHH on Lex, a multi-hour ode to Ruby on Rails, but is it any good?

3 months ago 1

Over the past few days, I've been listening to Lex interview DHH (just the programming parts, I'm not particularly interested in his views on other topics).

It's not the first time I've heard people praising Ruby on Rails, but every time I look at the documentation, I find myself thinking, "I don’t get why people are into this.".

My main critiques of Ruby are: - The syntax isn't great: it uses a lot of special characters, which makes writing the code slower. - No static types: when I first started programming, dynamic typing (like in JavaScript) seemed cool. But after working on large enterprise projects, there’s no way I’d choose a dynamically typed language again (Based on what DHH says, that probably makes me a "bad developer").

I haven't tried it myself, mainly because using a programming language for a side project versus a professional product is a completely different experience (someone might try JavaScript and argue it’s better than TypeScript, until they have to refactor something).

So I'm wondering, is this one of those cases where a tool is mainly used by a passionate niche, so all the feedback is positive? Or is Rails really as good as DHH says it is once you get into it?

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