Bashing? Nope. Rails is simply not how people write web apps anymore. Most people write a UI-independent API layer, and then write the UI in Javascript. This makes Rails largely unnecessary; you still use the individual pieces, but the framework as a whole no longer makes sense.
None of that is true. If you think it is, you're in a sheltered bubble too focused on the new hotness from the valley. Out in the real world, where there are millions upon millions of business apps being written, most people are still banging out apps server side.
I am from a sheltered bubble: one where we enjoy engineering efficient systems, and one where I work with the smartest people in the industry.
This is how we wrote boring business software at the investment bank where I last worked, and this is how we write software at Google, where I work now. People write apps this way now because it's faster, easier, and more flexible. (For me it means I don't have to tweak UI code anymore, there are lots of people that like to do that and now they don't have to care about the backend. Just use my API!)
But sure, I believe that not everyone does this; I still maintain legacy apps too. Why rewrite millions of lines of code nobody really cares about?
But that doesn't mean you should write a new web app in 2012 like you did it in 2008. Just like we stopped writing CGI scripts when good frameworks became available.
> But that doesn't mean you should write a new web app in 2012 like you did it in 2008.
There's actually plenty of reasons to continue doing things the old way. Just because new approaches are available doesn't mean they're always automatically a better fit than the old ones.
You can't overlook the people issue either. Companies don't just hire new staff because new stuff came out; they use their existing staff who may not have time to keep up with the latest and greatest, and it makes perfect sense for them to keep doing things the old way, which works just fine.
It was a bit of a link bait title, ironically rails is still probably the best serverside framework to write the kind of app he is advocating (just ignore the view bits). It is more that we need a "next evolutionary step" in how frameworks work to make writing rich client apps easier.
