[ssmoot]

Just looked at the rails documentation for the first time in years. It's drastically improved.

My experience with earlier versions was that you kinda had to piece it together yourself. Learning Play Framework was 10X easier for me since the docs were already there: https://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.5.x/Home

So I think maybe you're just not considering non-Ruby options. Which is totally your prerogative. Just saying it's not my experience. It may be the best Ruby framework. But that's a different argument.

> What I really need when I'm starting a new project and I'm working on a shoestring budget, is speed. I need to build something fast so I can get funded.

Aside from syntax, I don't see any reason anyone would be faster with Rails. It's certainly not my experience. I worked with Ruby for 8 years. I've seen some very talented and very enthusiastic Rails developers. I've never seen one that could build an app faster than even an ASP.NET developer from years ago, and I certainly don't see any advantage over Play, which is generally more stable, much faster, projects generally have fewer dependencies.

The performance advantage of other platforms is underappreciated IMO. The fastest code is no code. If I can do something in Scala through brute that would be impractical to do within the request/response cycle in a Rails Action, that's a development speed advantage. If I never need to consider using some sort of background job service like Resque or message queue because I can just say `Future(someComplexOperation)`, that's a development speed advantage. If I don't need to tune my app or worry about my caching strategies because it's just that fast... You get the point I'm trying to make I'm sure.

Outside of performance, deployment (far simpler with Play), language syntax, and ActiveRecord (I'd just use the simpler, faster Lightbend Slick library) they're basically the same framework. Play doesn't chart much new territory. Sure WebSockets integration with Actors is lightyears ahead. But many won't ever touch it. There's some JSON stuff with validations that's very powerful, but embedding the equivalent of a JSON schema in your Action is verbose beyond trivial examples. I'm not sure how much use it gets.

I found Play much easier to learn than Rails (again, this was years ago) and much more consistent. Given the other advantages, all things being equal (familiar with both Scala and Ruby), it's tough to imagine many developers choosing Rails unless they were worried about externalities like building a team or something.

It'd be interesting to hear the thought process of such developers though if they're out there.