[nahname]

It's a great tool for those that want to build CRUD apps quickly and get 99% of the things right. That speed comes from code re-use (mostly gems). Once you get experienced in rails, you primarily glue things together. It's fast, but does not feel rewarding.

[Toutouxc]

> speed comes from code re-use (mostly gems)

> Once you get experienced in rails, you primarily glue things together

Both of these are equally true for most other languages with mature ecosystems. IMO the speed of Rails development reflects the speed of Ruby development in general. The standard library has everything, all kinds of little methods for all kinds of little things. Combine that with ActiveSupport extensions and you can do everything.

  Date.today + 3.years + 2.days
  234.in?(2..235)
  [1,2,3].all?(&:odd?)

[nahname]

It's Active Record that makes rails code re-use especially unique. I don't know of any other framework where you can 1) be certain of the ORM 2) add database tables from a third party library 3) the whole experience not being cobbled together.