Why is Ruby on Rails so Good?

Can you tell me why is Ruby on Rails so good?

Ruby was designed concurrently with the Rails framework. That leads to higher programmer productivity.

They can slap together new apps together in record time.

Websites, too. Twitter, Groupon and others were built using Ruby on Rails.

Ruby on Rails is the darling of Silicon Valley.

Twitter and Groupon had to move off Ruby on Rails because it has a scalability limit.

It can build solid apps that are stronger than the average programming experiment, but it can not handle tens of millions of transactions.

In that regard, it is not so good.

If you can build a killer site in a matter of months with a small, affordable team in time to get angel investor funding, then needing to rewrite it later once you get big is a minor deal.

Yeah, you're right. Because most sites don't get that big, and if they do, they'll have the warning and funding to upgrade.

You are not dead set on Ruby.

It does not have planned upgrades for the language and framework itself. This means that new versions of Ruby may break apps built in the prior one.

Java is mostly backward compatible, but it is just as likely to crash in any version.

Ruby documentation is insufficient, and while there is a large user community, they do not aid each other as much as you find with Lisp or JavaScript.

Who on Earth uses Lisp? Well, maybe those guys manning the U.S. nuclear command, still using floppy disks to control things.

Ruby on Rails tends to be efficient because Ruby was designed to fit the framework for maximum efficiency. There's little redundancy.

That's part of what makes it efficient.

It does lack solid interfaces with modules in other languages, whereas you can run Java as an embedded app.

That's what causes so many errors in my web browser.

Ruby on Rails has its place, but the only real gem is the Ruby package manager.