I’ve been using Ruby on Rails exclusively for over a year now, but have used other web frameworks for longer periods of time (classic ASP, ASP.NET, and J2EE). Rails is unique in many ways, and if look hard enough online, you’ll find its qualities spelled-out for you.
Deprecation is one quality that isn’t spoken of much, but it’s one of my favorites. The Rails core team is adamant about doing things the best way possible. When it sees a better way of doing things, it immediately starts removing parts of the API that don’t meet that standard of perfection. Developers offload deprecated functionality into plug-ins that give teams time to migrate aging code, but the deprecated code doesn’t stay in the main code base for long.
The other frameworks I’ve used have kept deprecated API calls in for extremely long periods of time. Some I don’t think will ever disappear. These other APIs allow developers to continue using inefficient, poorly-designed, and overall bad code however long they want.
Rails isn’t simply doing things the best way possible, it trains its developers to do the same. I like that.
Ian Lotinsky 