I have a feeling there are a lot of people looking at this from a similar angle.<p>I feel that we are in a very transitional time for web development right now.  This is a field with a pretty high rate of change in general, but every now and then, things change dramatically even by web programming standards, and we go through a period of technological uncertainty.  The last time I remember feeling this way was the rise of object relational mappers, dependency injection, model view controller frameworks, and various tag libraries on the front end[1] in javaland.  I remember from a previous HN discussion that there is a web counter measuring the number of days since the last javascript framework was released.  I remember feeling the same way about struts, struts2, spring MVC, tiles, tapestry, JPA, hibernate, ibatis, spring DI, pico, guice, and so forth…<p>Interestingly, much of this didn&#x27;t so much get resolved as swept aside - Ruby and Rails, Django, and a few other technologies &quot;appeared&quot; [1, again] at this moment.  I do remember feeling extremely grateful for ruby and rails, because I had started to hate programming.  It wasn&#x27;t the Java verbosity that I objected- I rather enjoyed programming with servlets&#x2F;jsp and jdbc + the java web cookbook, and I never minded data structures and algorithms in Java - it was the churn and incredible amount of complexity just to do simple things that made me unhappy.  Rails got some bloat here and there, expand and consolidate, but I feel that it did accomplish its main goal, at least for me, which was that I felt happy and productive programming again.<p>Now, with the disruption of SPAs, we are clearly back in framework churn, and I&#x27;m not loving the model of writing the back end in rails-api and using a javascript front end.  I may warm up to this as my knowledge of javascript increases (and I certainly never minded going outside rails and writing sql, so I can&#x27;t really say I object to more than one language).  I&#x27;ve done a bit of ember, and it seems heavy to me, I have to duplicate so much routing, model, persistence, data tier work (I&#x27;m a noob, I may be doing it wrong, fully possible).  I don&#x27;t like looking at javascript as much as I like looking at ruby.  I also do remember feeling a bit frustrated with Rails in the beginning, before I understood it well enough to do an end-run around conventions, so like I said, I may really warm up to javascript frameworks.  But I really like Ruby, and I&#x27;m very satisfied with Rails (and if not rails, sinatra or something like that would be fine too).<p>Like I said earlier, I studied a lot of java-based MVC&#x2F;DI&#x2F;ORM approaches and ended up going with something that I hadn&#x27;t even considered (Rails).  I do think that in these highly transitional periods, this tends to happen - that you are surprised by the solution that ends up working for you.  At this point, it&#x27;s getting so speculative that I&#x27;m not highly confident in predicting things, but I wouldn&#x27;t be too surprised if the &quot;isometric&quot; transpiled languages (like ruby and opal) end up changing things dramatically (ie., just as I didn&#x27;t end up &quot;picking&quot; a java-based MVC&#x2F;DI&#x2F;ORM approach, I may not end up picking a javascript framework, I may end up surprised by a new and different approach).<p>[1] I understand these weren&#x27;t really &quot;new&quot; ideas, many of them (like a lot of CS) go back to the 1970s, but they hit the scene in that they became an issue in day to day development for ordinarliy up-to-date but not cutting edge web developers, the people who just wanted to get things done.