The same reasons why it was a worthy framework in 2004. The more things change, the more they stay the same. While we’ve seen a lot a progress in the JavaScript world, we’ve also seen a regression to the complexity-laden world that Rails offered refuge from in the early days.
The core premise of Rails remains in many ways as controversial today as it was when it premiered. That by formalizing conventions, eliminating valueless choices, and offering a full-stack framework that provides great defaults for anyone who wants to create a complete application, we can make dramatic strides of productivity.
Rails has an incredibly ambitious mission. In the full-stack goal lies a pursuit to deal with just about every piece of code needed to connect databases and no-sql stores to a business domain model written in Ruby to a set of controllers that expose that model via REST and then, yes, finally to HTML. But that last step is a small minority of the code and focus of Rails.
So if you think that client-side depends on MVC, React, Angular, or whatever is The Future, then you’re still squarely in the target audience for using Rails. Because the bits you use to design your HTML/JavaScript-based UI still needs to connect to a back-end domain model that saves stuff to the databases, computes things, enqueues jobs for later processing, sends out emails, triggers push notifications, and all the other stuff that real apps need to do.
Stability & Consistency
Rails has been around for over a decade, and while it sees commit activity on a daily basis, most updates are incremental and non-breaking. This means Rails developers have the security of knowing their knowledge will remain applicable and their apps will not suddenly be running on abandoned dependencies. For new developers, it’s a safe bet, which is more than can be said for many web frameworks.
Knowledgeable Community
WordPress is undisputed in its position as the most-used “framework” for building a new website. One of the pitfalls of immense popularity and ease of use is the tendency to attract inexperienced developers. While there are plenty of poorly developed Rails apps and gems, there’s a higher-than-average quality-level across Ruby-based tools.
When you need help, the expertise of the community is important, too. Take a look through questions tagged Ruby or Ruby on Rails on Stack Overflow, and you’ll quickly get a sense of the depth of knowledge there.
Enjoyment
Rails follows in the footsteps of Ruby by valuing the enjoyment of the developer. It shows in features that go out of their way to behave the way that you would intuitively expect, even when it violates soft rule of programming.
The cherry is that you get to use Ruby, which, even in a world that has rediscovered the benefits of functional programming and immutability, remains the most extraordinarily beautiful and luxurious language you will ever encounter. Just look at some code.
We dare you not to fall in love.
