This is all moot because greenfield projects rarely exist anymore outside of being an entrepreneur, and if you're selling something, you're probably using a shopify wrapper of some sort 99% of the time. If you're working on a greenfield project at a Fortune company, then you probably have a bunch of considerations and in-house frameworks you'll use as a jumping off point instead of running `rails new` at any point.
These discussions are pointless and I'm a little fed up with them. As another commenter has pointed out, this exact same article (with the exact same conversational style) has appeared for at least 10 years, though I'd push it to 15-20. Write something new...BUILD something new...but for god sake's stop reiterating the same point because it's SO. BORING.
I couldn’t agree more, I’ve worked with Ruby/Rails for the past 10 years, and the youngest codebase I saw was 5 years old at that point.
I did work on greenfield Rails apps but they were API only “microservices” so none of this FE stuff was needed.
In any nontrivial company, the Rails homegrown FE solutions are ignored entirely because you can’t hire Hotwire devs but you can hire plenty of React/Vue devs.
Also, the Rails “FE” stack has changed plenty and it’s also hard to keep up with it (remember CoffeeScript?), is poorly documented beyond the trivial hello world and like I said, has absolutely no mindshare.
So these discussions are entirely disconnected from the real world.
> This is all moot because greenfield projects rarely exist anymore outside of being an entrepreneur, and if you're selling something, you're probably using a shopify wrapper of some sort 99% of the time. If you're working on a greenfield project at a Fortune company, then you probably have a bunch of considerations and in-house frameworks you'll use as a jumping off point instead of running `rails new` at any point.
I have no idea how one manages to be a HN reader and come out with a proclamation like "there are no greenfield projects left".
Neither venerable monoliths nor Fortune 500 companies represent the mean website. You're looking at highly visible outliers and ignoring the forest for the few redwoods that poke above the rest.
The care that's put into ensuring `rails new` creates something sane and basically production ready is exemplary. It's the missing middle between Hello World and terse API autodocs that so many tools just lack. Whether one uses Rails or not, this is something to emulate, not glibly denigrate.