It really didn't otherwise there would be a lot more than just those two, everyone would follow their beat. We all ran rails 10 years ago and realized that unless you're a large corp with money to burn on 'ecosystem' then Rails doesn't make a lot of sense.

I want to like rails and to see it do well, but it's not keeping pace with the rest of its peers. As competitive as web dev is these days, it's not sufficient to just be rails, you need a ruby alternative to rails as well. Look at javascript. Nobody uses javascript straight up, there's a multitude of rails-like frameworks for javascript. A new one is made each day, and they have staying power.

Ruby has Rails, and some might argue that metaphorically speaking Rails has Ruby, by its polite little balls. Unfortunately Rails's star power is outliving Ruby's and given that new Ruby devs aren't being born every day, it's not hard to see that that's bad for Rails.

I'd love to see rails move to JS or Elixir or something that'll get people interested in it again, and KEEP them this time by being written in something fast.

so much of the web is php and rails it just feels alien to see this kind of thought process

Rewriting all of Rails to a different language would be a humongous effort. And as you've mentioned it's been done tons of time already: almost every language has a "Rails-y" framework. Some are good, some a bit less so, but they exist. Rails in $other_language would also no longer be Rails, because other languages have different ways of doing things.

In short, if you don't want to use Ruby, then don't use Rails.

Also, many large Rails services have some performance-critical parts written in $other_language such as Elixer, Go, Rust, etc. "Using Rails" doesn't mean you need to use it for every last bit.

With the current economic downcycle it is also the most budget oriented option. We will see a reborn of the "Full-Stack" for a while.

LOL at the idea of JS frameworks having staying power. Is this GPT?

Yes but we should not look at unicorns to settle this argument. After all not every company has the size of a unicorn, the world is not big enough for that. Very few companies get to the point that any random technology won't do.

I've seen dozens of Rails projects going in production and many are still there. Same thing for any other programming language I guess. For normal sized companies Rails is OK.

What matters is: do you still find developers to work with your technology after 2, 5, 10, 20 years? If you don't, you have to move the project where the developers are. In the case of Rails they are still here for hire.

I just hired a developer for a Rails application. They definitely exist :-).

I don't know if anyone needs to think about 20 years from now anymore with the new A.I advancements we see on a monthly basis. I'd be surprised if humans still wrote code 20 years from now but we'll see...

Adding a few more to the list; Twitch, dribbble, hulu, zendesk, airBnB, Square, Kickstarter, Heroku, Coinbase, Soundcloud, cookpad, slideshare.

I guess, if you choose Rails, there is more chance you will build something beyond MVP as you get to focus on what you build not how.