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Rails is good for two things: Fast iterating and fast on-boarding new employees.

If you want to start a startup, and you know Rails, use Rails with Postgres.

Do the complicated shit (data science, video uploads, etc) in your other language if you have complicated shit. Use a different subdomain or get nginx to fork the endpoints for the complex shit if it needs to be public.

I've known plenty of people, myself included, that tried something else because of "reasons" but the real reason was I wanted to try some new language or framework but it gets old fast.

> I'm gunna use Riak!

I said. Then I needed to do some random task that would have been trivial in SQL.

> I'm gunna use Go!

I said. Then I spent hours fiddling with types and boiler plate code and catching errors.

These are not solving problems startups have. These technologies solve problems that huge companies have. My only gripe with Rails is that I think it should be JSON-first, not HTML-first, because almost everyone needs an API these days and many people use front end frameworks for HTML, but whatever. It's not that hard to override that stuff.




Agreed with all of these points.

> I think it should be JSON-first, not HTML-first

Isn't that the case in Rails 5? https://guides.rubyonrails.org/5_0_release_notes.html#api-ap...


Yes, I'd forgotten that that was option I should have addressed. The issue is that I want things like cookies to be supported out of the box for things like Ember, even if I want other API consumers to use locally stored tokens. But you're right. There is some attention going that way.


Check out the Rail API gem. It's default in Rails 5 and makes JSON and HTML the default.




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