[LRUG] Does Rails have an image problem?

[James Adam]

> On 17 Aug 2020, at 16:29, Edmond Lepedus <ed.lepedus at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 
> I’ve been asked questions like “Isn’t Rails abandonware now?”, been pointed to StackOverflow’s developer survey (https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted-other-frameworks-libraries-and-tools-loved3 <https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted-other-frameworks-libraries-and-tools-loved3>) as ‘evidence’ for NodeJS’s superiority and been told that “the majority of Rails consultants make their money on migrating people to other platforms”. 

It seems unfathomable to me that more than half (57%) of the people currently working with Ruby would actively choose to _not_ work with Ruby on their next project. And labelling that as “dreaded” seems like a gross editorialisation. In summary, I think that survey is froth. But anyway...

> My current team would benefit hugely from Rails. It would do wonders for everything from code quality and productivity to documentation and our ability to hire and onboard new developers, but I fear that we will once again default to NodeJS and miss out on most of those benefits. 

I was going to say that the only legitimate reason I can imagine a client might rationally care about framework choice is the availability and cost of developers, but based on what you wrote above, it sounds like there isn’t a compelling NodeJS angle there either… or is there? Extremely anecdotally I think a good number of bootcamps are teaching javascript/react now, so maybe the clients are considering that?

> How do you sell Rails in a compelling way?

I’d be interested in seeing this flipped — can they sell you on NodeJS, beyond pointing at essentially-meaningless sentiment surveys? Have the people you’re trying to convince used Rails and had problems with it? I think the pitches supporting NodeJS will reveal a lot about the inherent bias you might be dealing with, and might lead to some ideas about how to circumvent them (and whether or not it’s worth trying).


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