Ruby on Rails came on the scene late in my web-focused career when I wasn't paying a lot of attention to new things (I was turning more toward the back-end and revisiting my roots in high-performance computing). That said, I dabbled in it and the main thing that stood out to me was how nicely it solved the most common types of web applications many of us were building at the time.
Like many useful things, it outgrew what it did best and was plied into service in places that didn't play to it's strengths, leading to a generation of web developers whose only impression of 'Rails is that of hard to maintain, unreliable and expensive to run websites.
It doesn't help that some of the loudest voices in the Ruby on Rails community turned out to be terrible people.
It's a shame that things went down this way because I think in many ways 'Rails was a useful and powerful tool, it just wound-up in the wrong hands.
Maybe what I'm about to say will upset or offend some people but if you know me you know this isn't a slight but a compliment: I think Ruby on Rails could have been BASIC for the web.
When I've written about BASIC before I reference the adults I knew when I was a kid who used their 8-bit personal computers to run their businesses, automate their farms and enhance their hobbies. None of these people were "developers" or "engineers" or "computer scientists", they were people who made things or provided services to other people and saw the personal computer as a way to improve the Quality of those activities. The fact that you had to write a program to make the computer useful was expected, after all, who would know what you need more than yourself? So you spent a Saturday with the BASIC manual that came with the computer and you started making yourself some tools.
Just before the dawn of the web the idea that "normal" people would learn to program and write exactly the software they needed seemed absurd if not impossible. Computers became a consumer product and software along with it. An entire industry bent toward convincing the world that they were helpless to accept the limited amount of software they could afford to buy, and that writing software be left to "professionals".
Then the web reopened that door a crack.
It wasn't long before people figured out how to write interactive software within the constraints of the web's hypertext protocol. Patterns emerged, and most applications were built from a combination of an HTML "front-end" running in the browser, a "back-end" running on the web server and a SQL database behind all of it keeping records. Pounding-out applications in this architecture kept me and my kind busy during the late 90's and it was lucrative work because while the subject matter of the applications were varied, the underlying components were similar and all of it required some specialized knowledge and the ability to maintain and operate some expensive infrastructure to keep it all running well.
This was all fine and good but it maintained the need for "professionals" to write the software, which priced it out of reach for many people. The idea that a person could create a piece of software for the web that met their needs precisely remained the domain of professional programmers (now "web developers") and dedicated computer hobbyists.
I don't know what the creators of Ruby on Rails personal ambitions were for their project, but the result was something that once again kicked-open the door for almost anyone to create powerful software, now on the web, without dedicating themselves to being a "computer person". I watched scores of people whose businesses or other projects had nothing to do with computers spend a couple days worth of time learning 'Rails produce fun and useful web applications that did exactly what they needed. More surprising, the Quality, performance and stability of these applications were on-par with many of the "professionally made" web apps at the time. It was obvious to me (but perhaps not to others) that the reason for this parity between the RoR apps and the professional ones was a matter of audience and scale; A bespoke program for a niche application has organic limits on it's needs for scalability, customization, etc.
This stage is how RoR reminded me of BASIC, an explosion of creativity and diversity of software made possible by a tool that fit into the hands of almost anybody, removing the cost and sociopolitical barriers that made custom professional software development inaccessible to most people.
It was a good time, but as I've learned from almost half a century in the "tech industry", good times like this only last until the profiteers start sniffing-around.
I don't know exactly why or how it started but just like BASIC and the personal computer somebody figured out they could make money by capturing the power this tool gave to the people and over time RoR's became a professional pursuit as well. This pushed it into areas it was probably never intended for (or at least clearly wasn't designed for) in the first place and as was predicted, the results were disappointing to disastrous.
Like BASIC (or any other "hand tool") when pressed into service for industrial-scale applications it broke, not because it's bad, but because it designed to be good at something else, something in my opinion much more important.
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026