RoR is a beast, it has its place. The issue we have today is that everything is to fast paced, so fast that people feel the need to follow the latest and greatest, or they will be left behind.
This has (in my opinion) lead to a false sense that if something is not hyped as often, then its not used either.
What do you mean "left behind"? Are you saying people will actually gt "left behind" or just that people will _feel_ like they're left behind?
At this poitn you can find tools that can make demos easier to build or get you further in a hackathon, but Rails embodies "Slow is steady and steady is fast." If you're trying to build something that will stick around and can grow (like a startup outside of the latest VC crazes) then Rails will arguably do better at keeping your tools relevant and supported in the long run. That is, assuming you're building something that needs a steady backend for your application.
> At this point you can find tools that can make demos easier to build or get you further in a hackathon.
I don't understand this at all. ruby on rails is probably peak technology for getting something up an running fast at a hackathon. its a very streamlined experince with a ton of drop in plugins for getting to the product part of the mvp. Maintaining a ruby app is a nightmare overtime. At least it was 5 years ago the last time I worked fulltime in a startup using ruby on rails.
These days I use elixir. its higher performance and reasonably fast to write in but I woudln't say its as productive as ruby on rails if you're competing in a hackathon.
The language encourages metaprogramming, and disencourages typing. This makes maintenance much more complicated when compared to other languages such as Python, typescript or PHP.
I don't really know if I would agree on saying that RoR failed, from recent my experiences, it's still a sought after tool for startups.
I do share your opinion on the untyped part, it's a bit of a bummer but there are gems to Ruby that helps with that.
Regarding the monkey patches, it's a concern many have and because of that, there is now a cleaner way of doing it! It's called a refinement. It's like monkey patching but in a more controlled way where you don't affect the global namespace.
This has (in my opinion) lead to a false sense that if something is not hyped as often, then its not used either.