On Mon, Sep 22, 2025 at 7:12 PM Andy Maleh via ruby-talk <ruby-talk@ml.ruby-lang.org> wrote:
Ruby on Rails Conferences Are Discriminatory, Unintelligent, and Hateful of Ruby in 2025: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5hRgxBa2u8
It would have been cool to link to your blog post here IMO instead of the video, so I'll do that: https://andymaleh.blogspot.com/2025/09/ruby-on-rails-conferences-are.html That being said, I remember being there for the "pivot" away from the .rjs templates that Rails had to generate JavaScript payloads. As I recall, the winning argument was that front-end asset "compilation" was "so fancy" and "so special" that it had to be a unified thing, and that it was best to have such tools be written natively in the target language. I can't remember the popular asset packager at the time, but there have of course been zillions since. I haven't used ReactJS hard enough to have much of an opinion on it, so I'll assume it's perfect. I have been employed professionally in the past as a JavaScript library maintainer. But see, here's the thing. Why was Rails built in Ruby in the first place? Because Ruby is the language Matz designed with the explicit intent of making programmers _feel joy_! From that starting point, forcing framework users to use something other than Ruby, no matter how lovely whatever that is, is treason. To me that's the core issue, not whether ReactJS is good at permalinks etc. (Semi-related, I am currently planning a Ruby fork to divest from my beloved RubyGems, having lost maintainer status like many. It's time to separate the "joy machine" from the concerns of corporations.) (If you know about the irc conversation that gave Ruby its name, you already know what my fork is called.) All the best, --Wilson.