"tech bankruptcy"! this is a VERY strong sentiment. First of all, I've never seen a rails-based company which has it problems from tech department, and not from product market fit or whatever, and that's in a 18 year carreer. I'm singlehandedly refactoring right now a 10-yearish rails app which had a period of neglect and bad contractors who broke every single test, and it is still very much manageable.
> I've never seen a rails-based company which has it problems from tech department
I've been using Rails since 1.0, owe much of my career to it, and still think it's an incredible framework that I love using.
But I have seen plenty of startups—mostly filled with junior developers—who don't have the maturity and experience to avoid some really bad ideas absolutely wall themselves into a corner. Thankfully the worst of this was in the Ruby 1.8 and Rails 2.3 era, but it still happens today.
A lot of the issue is the tendency that Ruby libraries have toward exposing internal details that end up getting relied upon (Hyrum's law in action).
With a sufficient number of users of an API,
it does not matter what you promise in the contract:
all observable behaviors of your system
will be depended on by somebody.
(There's something about the way people manage to phrase these that I really enjoy. Something about the succinct and clear expression of an idea that's otherwise really fuzzy in my head.)
It's interesting to think about the implementation being necessarily coupled with the interface. In some context that's obvious, but the idea that another implementation can't be freely swapped in -- because nuanced behavior (sometimes called a bug) in the original implementation is still expected -- is one I hadn't, as such, thought much about before.
I agree it's a strong sentiment. But development seems to slow to a crawl at around that time from what I've seen. And then it seems like keeping the app going needs extremely strong developers around it, which not every company can afford. It's just bad value; you have to pay a lot to continue to develop at a normal pace.
I think the fact that we are trying to shove typing onto Ruby with Sorbet and RBS are a sign that maybe it's not the best programming language once you reach critical mass.
It's possible the grass is greener and this is what happens to every tech department... but I'm not totally convinced. I always hit a point with Rails apps where I can see the refactorings I'd like to make but I know it's not worth the pain of the inevitable `NoMethodError` at run-time in production. And that's _with_ a giant test suite.
