[andycroll]

I can definitely accept that Rails is now somewhat old hat.

And agreed that the Rails 2 to 3 jump was (and still is for many codebases) a tricky and difficult path.

However, I'd argue that doing your 'startup' in [Rails/COBOL/PHP/Logo/Java] is probably a decent idea if you have good engineers who can build something stable relatively quickly. Technology is _rarely_ the problem in any given startup.

If scalability and speed is a problem, congratulations, you're a success.

Rails is still good at giving you the tools to build decent CRUD-ish apps pretty fast and deployment is thankfully a solved problem.

Rails is not the new hotness, but it's still great at getting prototypes out the door and can scale you a long way. I think I'm cool with that.

> our front end has gone from Prototype to jQuery to Coffeescript to Angular to React with major productivity improvements each time

Also rewriting your front-end four times doesn't seem that productive.

[kylnew]

> If scalability and speed is a problem, congratulations, you're a success.

I can not emphasize this enough. A lot of solutions are absolutely good enough for a startup's needs. You obviously don't want something completely throw away, but too much concern over tools & performance is kind of like a premature optimization for your whole business.

[mooreds]

Right. Just finding something that you can build on (and get started yesterday) with the team you have. Of course, it doesn't hurt to pick from one of the top 10 languages so that, if you do succeed, you have a talent pool to pull from.

But this is definitely a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good.

[mattdeboard]

> rewriting your front-end four times doesn't seem that productive

So very, very true. You could keep a front-end developer employed for years just rewriting the same application in the latest JS tech.

[bpicolo]

At the current rate, none of your rewrites finish

[ken47]

I know static vs. dynamic typing was not covered in the article, but all things equal, it should be easier to onboard new devs into a statically typed codebase.

[robmccoll]

I run into this constantly. Static typing is great. If it compiles, I've already avoided half the runtime problems that typically plague big Python code bases.

[borkabrak]

Could you elaborate on what you mean?

I'm not arguing; just curious.