What’s Up With All These Changes in Rails?
There's a deeper problem that Yehuda isn't hitting and that is that there is an inverse correlation between being cool and cutting edge and being consumer friendly.<p>Rails is, and really has always been, a framework which changes very quickly. Although virtually all of these changes are for the <i>better</i> either in some abstract feels-better sense or in a tangible practical sense, each of these changes imposes a cost on other people.<p>This isn't really a problem with the decisions of the rails core team, it is the entire ethos accompanying rails. Authentication plugins I remember from 4 years ago are barely maintained today, and there are a whole bunch of new ones. I'm guessing my knowledge re: authentication has a half-life of approximately 1.5 years.<p>The implications are as follows:<p>(1) If you are a Rails developer you need to be a full-time Rails developer and not do too much else. You can't do Rails and a bunch of other things because Rails will take up <i>a lot</i> of your time.<p>(2) Think you can code, release, and forget about it? Think again. If you have projects, you (and the people who commissioned the projects) need to know that these projects need to have at least 5 hrs / week budgeted for the indefinite future (perhaps less, but the point is that they need a developer on staff -- they can't simply be released and forgotten about).<p>(3) Extra caution, since not all change is good change. You may end up to subject whatever is cool at the time. That's not to say that this really affects the core team, but there are a gazillion Rubyists out there attempting to change everything over to MongoDB that works just fine in whatever flavor of SQL they were running before. A lot of people have been burned here.<p>All of these take away from the promise and excitement of Rails for many people -- which was not simply "oh we can be on the cutting edge of technology," but "oh, we can have a sexy app with decent functionality up in a matter of a couple weeks with half the budget of what we thought."  That second impression, which is what a lot of the Rails ecosystem is built off of, is largely false (esp. now that there are a bunch of other quickstart web frameworks).