> You can be productive on day one, rather than wiring together low level libraries for database access and the like.
One of my big gripes with Rails is defaulting to ActiveRecord, compared to pretty every alternative (my favourite is Sequel). This is the problem with Rails: You can be productive if you can be productive with its default choices.
But in every project where Rails has been involved that I've worked on, sooner or later people start fighting one of the Rails default choices, and the problem with that is that so many parts are expected to be there by other components they bring in, so even things that are in theory replaceable are in practice tightly coupled.
Does using Sequel instead of ActiveRecord cause problems? I understood it can be used pretty much as a drop-in replacement, but I gather that's not quite the case?
I believe it has gotten easier. But the problem is not so much Rails itself - Rails has gotten steadily better at reducing coupling. The problem is that Rails on its own is not that interesting - what makes Rails is the ecosystem around it. And a lot of the Rails philosophy (convention over configuration etc.) contributes to an environment where people make a lot of assumptions. Active Record is often one of them.
One of my big gripes with Rails is defaulting to ActiveRecord, compared to pretty every alternative (my favourite is Sequel). This is the problem with Rails: You can be productive if you can be productive with its default choices.
But in every project where Rails has been involved that I've worked on, sooner or later people start fighting one of the Rails default choices, and the problem with that is that so many parts are expected to be there by other components they bring in, so even things that are in theory replaceable are in practice tightly coupled.