> Popularity of a framework or paradigm seems largely driven by marketing and memes.

I think a whole lot of developers choose technologies because they are popular at the moment for two reasons: they lack the technical knowledge and experience or maybe just confidence and/or they avoid some responsibility this way (since everyone is doing it).

Of course this is most acute in web development because it attracts younger developers.

Also the words performance and scalability attracts developers like moth to a flame.

Not going to defend choosing what’s popular just because it’s popular but the main argument for using something popular IMO is that most of the sorts of things you want to do is likely to have been done by someone else already and some of those other people will have written about their solution or made libraries etc that you can reuse. Whereas if not many people are using something then the amount of information you can find, even in the official docs, is likely to be lacking. So you can save a lot of time by using something even moderately popular compared to using something that few other people use.

However, the caveat of course is that if you blindly choose something just because it’s popular, or in spite of your own skepticism towards it because you let the hype get to you, then it is very much possible that you end up using something that is unfit for what you are trying to do and which even though someone else has used it for the same purpose is going to lead you to implement something that has poor performance, is too inflexible and/or has other undesirable properties.

But really, the proper way to choose frameworks and libraries is to look at the docs themselves and benchmarks and make your decision based on that. Not to lazily use popularity as a proxy for estimating suitability/ease of use.

"popular tech is safe because someone will have done what you want to do" is phrased negatively in this excellent opinion piece: with a new technology/tool, you don't know what can go wrong. With boring technology, there's enough community experience around it. https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology

It also seems like 'boring = popular & old', 'hype = popular & new'.

> the main argument for using something popular IMO is that most of the sorts of things you want to do is likely to have been done by someone else already and some of those other people will have written about their solution or made libraries etc that you can reuse.

Yes but this holds true for something older that was popular at some other time (like Rails) and is no longer as widely promoted. Those are way safer choices.

Young developers (as one myself), tend to be overly focused on what makes them attractive as a developer. Kinda like an overly insecure teenager. So they pounce on any framework or tech that makes them desirable to an employer. Rails isn't hot, so it won't get them a job so they won't learn it.

That's flat out wrong. As a Rails developer, I have a weekly stream of recruiters trying to get my attention.

I think a lot of developers focus on learning newer technology stacks because they are hot and tend to pay more. But less popular doesn't mean it's not in demand.

I know 2 COBOL programmers who are being paid a ton of money because of critical banking systems running it and candidates are hard to find.

It's about perception. But the trend is what it is: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=r...

If you look at the trend for 'rails' it's much more level and googling 'rails' three of the top four results are for the framework. It may be people no longer have to type 'ruby on...'.

I don't like ruby or rails. But I feel not liking it has really hurt my career. The amount of job requests I get for Ruby on rails or ruby is significantly higher than my typcial stack.

Additionally a majority of the remote jobs I've seen have been Ruby as well. So despite it not being hip. It is still very much a requirement.

> Rails scales

Your post is a bit misleading. Rails can scale but to get there is different than with other stacks. Some would say, it's much more challenging or complicated, some would call it just a PITA and if you really, really want to scale, like e.g. a porn site, Rails is the worst choice you could ever take. Or you would just completely rewrite it but what is then the motivation to take a framework? Maybe frameworks are wrong...?

However, I think dev productivity is more important since scaling is a requirement which is very often not needed and introducing it too early is just premature optimization.

Still, I dislike if people spread false information. Rails can scale to a certain (limited) degree but it never was easy, just the deployment then without Docker was a big mess (I didn't know one Rails guys who could deploy anything without Heroku).

So let's just forget about Basecamp, Github, AirBnb, Hulu, Kickstarter, MyFitnessPal, Twitch and all the other Rails sites and continue to pretend Rails can't scale and won't work for the modern web.

I love Ruby and like Rails, but unless you can cache most of your content, scaling is going to cost you.

None of them is on a standard unmodded Rails stack.

I'm not sure any highly-scaled, mature application is on a standard unmodded anything stack.

Basecamp is always on the latest or beta version of rails, Rails 6 at the moment. GitHub has recently updated to version 5 and are merging a large mount of their scaling gems for version 6.

There are some podcasts and keynotes where DHH talks about their stacks.

Hulu was, and possibly still is, a Rails site. Streaming video is no problem for a Rails based application because the application server just prepares a URL for nginx to stream.