Ruby on Rails?

Why do people use Ruby on Rails? It's slow, ugly and has minimal support across web hosts. Suddenly, a lot of people I know are beginning to use it and I can't get straight answers from them as to why. One of my friends who uses it says he believes it's popular with Mac users because Ruby comes preinstalled on OSX, but so does Perl and Python. I asked another friend and he said "because it can serve dynamic web pages." At this point I just gave up and dismissed my friends for idiots who don't know shit about programming, so now I'm asking you, fellow /prog/riders: why do people who know how to program and know the alternatives use that shitty ass Ruby on Rails?

It's only slow if you go out of your way to make it slow and don't use the correct kind of database for your expected load. Often times the "it doesn't scale" argument boils down to the type of database used, not the Rails framework itself. This is a problem no matter what language or framework you use. Rails is awesome but it not the right tool for every job.

The code itself is about the most elegant code I've ever seen. Ruby as a language is expressive and powerful but terse when necessary. It has the syntactic beauty of Perl but has community standards that lead to actually beautiful code, not mangled jibberish that is unreadable to anyone but the original author. I suggest reading the books "Elegant Ruby" and "Metaprogramming Ruby". Rails as a framework makes excellent use of Ruby's strongest features and this lets developers write small amounts of easy to understand code that do an awful lot.

http://www.railshosting.org/
If you can't find a good inexpensive host from here then you're not trying. This argument was valid 4 or 5 years ago. Not in 2011.

I use it because it allows me to cut through the bullshit and get straight to the part of web apps that matter. I don't want to reinvent the wheel. Plenty of people see things the same way. Hence the sudden explosion in popularity.

It's not that it's popular with Mac users, it's that lots of Rails developers switched to Mac because of TextMate. This is by no means the majority of Rails developers, but it is a disproportionate amount compared to other frameworks and languages. Personally for Ruby/Rails development I use RubyMine on either Linux or Windows.

And it's not that it serves dynamic web pages, lots of things do that, obviously. It's that it is one of the better MVC frameworks and makes the task simple for trivial cases but allows you to do just about anything you want if you know what you're doing.

Before talking shit on Rails try sitting down and learning a little Ruby and then making fun something with it. I've been programming for over a decade now and doing server side web development pretty much the entire time. I got started with Rails around 5 years ago now and can honestly say it absolutely changed the way I think about programming and making websites for the better.