Why do people use Ruby on Rails?

Ruby on Rails is a web development framework that has been around since early in beginning of the decade. DHH Created the library in August 2004 when he was developing his new software Basecamp which is still around 20 years later.

In 2003, DHH had just started reading about Ruby. For him, the most interesting part was that it didn’t look like any other programming language he’d seen before. ‘It looked like pseudocode’, David says. He pitched Ruby to Jason and then started working on Basecamp using Ruby.

Now basecamp generates 374.8M in revenue each year so assuming DHH & Jason Fried both own 50% the amount DHH could take home is possibly more than 100M a year.

Its hard to believe DHH back then who was a student in college created the whole web development framework rails over the course of 2 years. Probably taking his previous experience in building apps and having to create all these features to allow the web app to process web requests, connect to an IP address and get requests from the server then rendering responses. After releasing his framework DHH immediately began promoting it in the programming community and comparing it to well known languages like Java.

Since they decided to make it Open Source it meant anyone could use the library and contribute to make it better which over the year has been the best decision with over 34 thousand closed pull requests ( contributions ) and millions of Apps using Rails as there backend library of choice.

I have no Idea what the world would be like without Rails but I'm sure coding would still be a very complicated task. I love the Rails community and there push to keep web development simple and avoid unnecessary complexity. That's what I love about the Hotwire framework being able to build most of the interactive features you would want from a web app without the need for custom JavaScript.