alt Hacker NewsWe've been running Rails apps in production continuously since 2007. If you treat software as anything other than completely disposable, it's been a no-brainer for the entire 19+ years I've been paying attention (not despite its age, but because of it).
The premise that you get meaningful efficiencies from JavaScript on the back-end just because you have to use it on the front-end has been pretty thoroughly debunked at this point. Instead you mostly get a larger blast radius when the front-end ecosystem has its monthly identity crisis. OP's "stacks-du-jour" and programming language "flavour of the month" framing is exactly right. A shocking amount of web software architecture is just following fashion trends dressed up as technical decision-making.
Most of the churn in tech stack isn't driven by engineering requirements, it's driven by résumé optimization and Hacker News anxiety. Rails has quietly been powering serious businesses the whole time. Does anyone think NPM's 3.1 million packages enable more functionality than RubyGems' 190,000 packages?
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> Does anyone think NPM's 3.1 million packages enable more functionality than RubyGems' 190,000 packages?
It means that there are many more people using NPM.
That means more users. More users is almost always better, for any language.
Also many of those gems on rubygems are dead since decades, literally. Probably also for NPM. We can not just compare the numbers without analysis.
We've also been running Rails in production for 15+ years (since 2011) in two companies and it has been serving us greatly. Hiring is tough, but I definitely believe the stack makes up for it due to the productivity gains.
In late 2025 we decided to migrate one of them to Inertia. Public facing pages is already done, and we're 80% through migrating the logged in area (it's a huge app). We choose Vue.js.
It's amazing how powerful this stack is and how little you have to change in the backend.