Rails has been getting a lot of flack lately, instead of the usual hype. Zed Shaw, author of Mongrel, recently blew his top off against the Ruby on Rails community leaders and said that Rails is a ghetto. Zed is getting a lot of attention from this explosive rant but this is not the first time a prominent developer/blogger has spoken out against the Rails framework and it’s leadership. Before Zed went AWOL on the Rails community, Derek Sivers of CD Baby switched back to PHP after working with Rails for two years without releasing a product. Perhaps the first notable negative article regarding Rails’ performance was a five question interview with Twitter developer Alex Payne. Since then there has been many more potty mouthed articles against Rails and its infallible dear leader, better known by his initials DHH, such as Imploding Rails, Jesus DHH, and the Uncle Ben Principle, 10 Areas Where Rails Fails, Ruby, Rails and RSpec burned a day off my lifespan, and How to ruin a Rails project.

So why all the Rails bashing? Most Rubyist and Railist will brush off and dismiss such comments as coming from Java playa hatin’ developers, but this is not the case, these articles are written from the perspective of fellow Ruby on Rails hackers, developers, and contributers. The experience of these Ruby on Rails developers remind me of the testimonials of people that escaped from a Peoples Temple cult; they been to the other side and it is not as green as it was portrayed, especially if you do not adhere without question to the opinionated papal bull-shit of the core Rails church leaders. I think some of the comments that Rails nay sayers are trying to address is that the Rails community is itself falling into the trap of eating it own dogma. But I am not a Rails heretic, so instead of paraphrasing, let me quote some of the most interesting remarks from the aforementioned articles.

Any discussion about Rails with ultimately lead to it’s performance.

Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling issues – issues that any growing site eventually contends with – far sooner than I think we would on another framework.

— Five Question Inverview

None of these scaling approaches are as fun and easy as developing for Rails. All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise.

— Five Question Inverview

Consider that Rails is the Love Child of Web 2.0 and Disillusioned Web 1.0 Developers, whole shops and corporate departments are adopting Rails as a way to push their applications into production more rapidly – what happens when they try to scale these apps and get “Twitter’d”?

— Imploding Rails

The main Rails application that DHH created required restarting ~400 times/day. That’s a production application that can’t stay up for more than 4 minutes on average.

— Rails is a ghetto

The greatest thing about Ruby on Rails is neither Ruby nor Rails, the best aspect of Rails is that it questioned the ‘best practices’ (or worst nightmares) of the current state of web development with its philosophy of Convention over Configuration and Don’t Repeat Yourself principle. Ruby and Rails is not the next best thing, it is just the missing link to the next best programming language and framework, or at least this is the logic of some PHP developers…

Is there anything Rails can do, that PHP CAN’T do? The answer is no.

— 7 reasons I switched back to PHP

Rails was an amazing teacher. I loved it’s “do exactly as I say” paint-by-numbers framework that taught me some great guidelines. … But the main reason that any programmer learning any new language thinks the new language is SO much better than the old one is because he’s a better programmer now!

— 7 reasons I switched back to PHP

Zed’s great rant opus against the Rails elite provided insight from an insider’s point of view, although he complains as he was an outsider. Zed did not mince words and especially goes nuclear against ThoughtWorks and Dave Thomas.

This is exactly what makes Rails a ghetto. A bunch of half-trained former PHP morons who never bother to sit down and really learn the computer science they were too good to study in college.

— Rails is a ghetto

They [Rails community] were all a bunch of little ghetto fabulous princesses trying to make it in this tiny little Rails world and not enough brains between them all to make it happen.

— Rails is a ghetto

When you combine stupid businesses with stupid people using a stupid framework based on a big fat fucking lie on a shitty platform you get the perfect storm of dumbfuck where a man like me can’t find work.

— Rails is a ghetto

Sorry guys, but having a 1:4 code:test ratio is not focusing on code quality. It’s focusing on test quality.

— Rails is a ghetto

He [Dave Thomas] basically had full access to the code and the people who wrote Rails and a direct line to DHH and still couldn’t write a decent book on writing a Rails application.

— Rails is a ghetto

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