It is going through the "small, cohesive" -> "full-featured!" -> "bloated" -> "modular" -> "too many abstractions" cycle.. in terms of overall adoption, I'm not sure. Many people like having all the "hard" problems solved for them.

People tend to talk about what's new and shiny because there is greater social reward for being the advocate of something new/better than there is to say "what we have is good enough and so I like using it!"

Orthodoxy has greater social reward when everyone around you is orthodox...

It's just you. :) In seriousness, many of the newer stacks (e.g. Meteor) offer fast ways to get started then you realize you need functionality such as authentication, authorization, server-side validations, migrations, queues, caches, API connections to other sites to retrieve data, etc. When you add all that in, you're essentially rolling your own large framework of pieces.

Definitely what we need in a thread about a security issue in a hugely popular web stack is a language war.

"MRI scares the bejeezus out of me" - you, an hour ago

I think asking about alternatives is fair game.

JRuby is a good alternative.

You know where the "better alternatives to Rails" thread goes, and it's nowhere helpful for a security advisory post. But, your call, not mine.

He got some decent responses so it seems like it turned out okay. You can give the audience here a little bit of credit, really.

Nope, its just that other things are being hyped apart from rails.