According to the article, the upgrade took 1 year for 3.2 > 4.2, and then just 5 months for 4.2 > 5.2. The project began with one FTE, and some volunteers, and expanded to 4 FTEs. But the author says almost none of them had ever done a Rails upgrade before.
I'm curious to what you think would be a better framework for Github to have used, that would've allowed for easier, speedier point upgrades? Rails likely was a big advantage (as it usually is) in the initial stages. Are you seriously expecting it to be just as smooth when the site experiences exponential user and feature growth? That moving from Rails 3 to 5 was doable, with what sounds like a small team and no massive service disruption, seems like a very strong argument that Rails can still be effective in a company's middle-age years.
ASP.NET MVC as uncool as that might be. IMO this is as close to the benefits of Rails you can get in a statically typed language. And it really doesn't take very long in developing a project for static typing to start saving you time either. IDEs can just be a lot more intelligent with static types, and it can be a big help in the readability of code without fully understanding the broader context.
The upgrade to .NET Core is probably worse than a Rails upgrade though, although it's not really the same thing as .NET Framework will continue to be updated for awhile. Switching to Core is really only necessary if running on Linux servers is a big win for you.
Migrating an ASP.Net MVC app from .Net Framework to .Net Core isn't really an upgrade, as both frameworks are continually updated.
The migration is a pain, but just upgrading from MVC 4 to 5 wasn't painful.
I am sure 2 to 5 would have been a nightmare, especially if you were using the deprecated Microsoft JavaScript libraries, and needed to replace them with their jQuery alternatives.
> ASP.NET MVC as uncool as that might be. IMO this is as close to the benefits of Rails you can get in a statically typed language.
I agree .NET MVC is as close as you get to something like Rails with regards to productivity in a statically typed, enterprisy language.
But using .NET/C# at Github would still have ended up with a significantly larger codebase -- which means more code to maintain, and therefore also in all likelyhood more bugs.
Of course, I'm only saying that would be my pick today. I personally dislike working with dynamic languages, but I would say Rails was their best option at the time.
I'm curious to what you think would be a better framework for Github to have used, that would've allowed for easier, speedier point upgrades? Rails likely was a big advantage (as it usually is) in the initial stages. Are you seriously expecting it to be just as smooth when the site experiences exponential user and feature growth? That moving from Rails 3 to 5 was doable, with what sounds like a small team and no massive service disruption, seems like a very strong argument that Rails can still be effective in a company's middle-age years.