I’ve been playing around with ruby on rails recently, partly to play around with rails and partly to take a run at a web app I’ve been considering (which I’ve open sourced because why not?).

It turns out the last time I played with it was back in 2005 and slightly amusingly my thoughts on it haven’t changed all that much. The lack of configuration is still good, but the amount of magic involved makes it hard to understand what’s going on. The ease of finding documentation has improved dramatically – 10 years of blog posts really help. I’m still using TextMate and it’s still annoying that I can’t click a method name to jump to it’s definition – I hear good things about RubyMine but I’m not keen to invest that kind of money in what may be a very short-lived experiment.

The two big changes are that I’ve got 10 years more development experience and the quality of gems seems to have improved significantly. The extra experience means I pick things up a lot faster, understand them more deeply and am a lot less convinced that the way I’m used to is the only right way. The improved quality of gems makes it far less likely that I’ll waste a heap of time struggling with a poorly written gem and instead can drop it in and see benefits straight away.

While all the hipsters may consider rails old-hat now and moved onto node or go, from what I’ve seen it’s matured extremely well and is in a fairly ideal point in the hype-cycle – still getting a lot of attention, embedded enough to have loads of people with experience in it and code depending on it so it will never go away but old and boring enough to be well documented with good libraries and not changing dramatically every week.