DHH answers: What makes Rails a framework worth learning in 2017?
Rails showed us all that web development didn&#x27;t have to be PHP and Apache and constant headaches. Node and Phoenix and the modern paradigm in general wouldn&#x27;t have come into existence, or achieved the popularity they have, without an act like Rails to follow. That&#x27;s awesome, and I respect it for that.<p>But can it truly be said that Rails has a purpose today? Its default performance remains lousy with any kind of load. Its convention-first approach means Rails knowledge doesn&#x27;t easily generalize, as can be seen in this very comment thread from the experience of those who&#x27;ve approached the Node ecosystem as though it were &quot;Javascript on Rails&quot;. The &quot;history? what history?&quot; attitude of its BDFL and his clique makes cause for trepidation out of the prospect of maintaining a Rails app over a significant length of time. And even by comparison with ES5, Ruby is a hot mess.<p>I get that DHH has to defend it. It&#x27;s his baby, after all. But it&#x27;s been a long time indeed since Rails had anything unique to offer beyond an ideology which is, in its own way, every bit as much a straitjacket as RMS&#x27; - and Rails&#x27; inheritors have innovated in ways that straitjacket makes it very hard at best for Rails to match.