CRUD apps are good business

Welp, I just did the thing I promised I'd never do and read the Hacker News comments for this otherwise lovely post pointing out the durable relevance of Ruby on Rails twenty years later. One comment stood out as so wrong, however, I couldn't help but clap back.

It started when someone wrote, presumably in praise of Rails, "I really like web apps that are just CRUD forms." CRUD is shorthand for the basic operations of "create, read, update, and delete", and those four verbs can express the vast majority of what anyone has ever wanted to do with a computer. It's why the spreadsheet was the killer app of the 80s and early 90s. It's why Rails 2's embrace of REST as a way to encapsulate CRUD over HTTP redefined how pretty much everyone has made web applications ever since.

Anyway, in response to the fellow above said he enjoys simple CRUD apps, somebody else wrote:

I really like easy problems too. Unfortunately, creating database records is hardly a business. With a pure CRUD system you're only one step away from Excel really. The business will be done somewhere else and won't be software driven at all but rather in people's heads and if you're lucky written in "SOP" type documents.

This struck me as pants-on-head levels of upside down. Father forgive me, but I hit reply with this:

As someone who co-founded one of the most successful Ruby on Rails consultancies in the world: building CRUD apps is a fantastic business.

There are two types of complexity: essential and incidental. Sometimes, a straightforward CRUD app won't work because the product's essential complexity demands it. But at least as often, apps (and architectures, and engineering orgs, and businesses) are really just CRUD apps with a bunch of incidental complexity cluttering up the joint and making everything confusing, painful, and expensive.

I've served dozens of clients over my career, and I can count on one hand the number of times I've found a company whose problem couldn't more or less be solved with "CRUD app plus zero-to-one interesting features." No technologist wants to think they're just building a series of straightforward CRUD apps, so they find ways to complicate it. No businessperson wants to believe their company isn't a unique snowflake, so they find ways to complicate it. No investor wants to pour their money into yet another CRUD app, so they invent a story to complicate it.

IME, >=90% of application developers working today are either building CRUD apps or would be better off if they realized they were building CRUD apps. To a certain extent, we're all just putting spreadsheets on the Internet. I think this—more than anything else—explains Rails' staying power. I remember giving this interview on Changelog and the host Adam asking about the threat Next.js posed to Rails, and—maybe I'd just seen this movie too many times since 2005—it didn't even register as a possible contender.

Any framework that doesn't absolutely nail a batteries-included CRUD feature-set as THE primary concern will inevitably see each app hobbled with so much baggage trying to roundaboutly back into CRUD that it'll fall over on itself.

Anyway, I believe in this point enough that I figured I should write it down someplace that isn't a deeply-nested comment at a place where I'd recommend you not read the comments, so that's how you and I wound up here just now.