> They don’t teach rails at uni. So straight off the bat it eliminates that large segment of people inspired by the dot-com bubble to get IT degrees to earn good bucks. Java and .NET developers are a dime a dozen. Also the barrier to entry with learning rails is a little tricky. PHP by comparison is fairly easy to get up and running. Some view this in the negative, or as arrogant elitism. I tend to think the high barrier to entry is innocuous and unintentionally weeds out those who arn’t committed to their craft.

Is there not a single rails developer who isn't totally full of themselves? It's a programming language. It's not magic, and rails doesn't mean you're a good programmer. I'm more and more frustrated every time I read stuff like this. When I was learning Rails I was berated with tutorials that made statements like "Rails is a whole new way of thinking" or "Rails means you don't have to work with cruft like braces!!". It's like being the apple fan-boy for a programming language. "Oh it's amazing and everything else means you're not committed to the craft".

I don't hate Ruby or the Rails framework, but I do hate this attitude that I see proliferated through the vast majority of people I speak to who use Rails.

Language|Framework X vs Language|Framework Y... I'm getting tired of this.

Its the concepts and fundamentals that are important. I bet you that most javascript and ruby developers dont know what an AST is and how a regex can be transformed into a state machine. Not even to mention how lambda calculus influenced lots of languages.

Anyway. Languages come and go. Frameworks come and go. However the problems associated with computer science, like distributed computing, scaling, mobility. They will stay.

The best software engineers are the ones that understand the basics. And most importantly: know how to use them in practice.

A good software engineer will choose a framework language depending on the domain / problem that needs to be solved.

Not because they like it.

> They don’t teach rails at uni. So straight off the bat it eliminates that large segment of people inspired by the dot-com bubble to get IT degrees to earn good bucks. Java and .NET developers are a dime a dozen.

Yep, just because you know a certain framework (not even a language, a freaking framework) means that you can pass judgement on how valuable every Java and .NET developer is. This guy obviously doesn't have a clue about what he's talking about. They don't teach any other framework at most universities. It's assumed you can learn that stuff on your own. Just because you went and learned Rails doesn't make you automatically a programming superstar.

Programmers are a dime a dozen. Good programmers are somewhat more expensive.

If bleeding-edge technology X proves to be widely useful, you have a brief window of opportunity where simply knowing X gives you an advantage.

Then you slowly become two for a dollar, three for a quarter.

I learned to program with Ruby, and used Ruby+Rails exclusively for 2 years until I learned Java, C++, C#, and Python.

I thought I was just a Ruby guy, but once I was exposed to other languages I realized that once you know how to program, the language you program in doesn't matter.

Sure some languages are better at specific tasks, but they're all just tools; if you can use one you can probably pick up another one with very little difficulty (this also assumes were talking about object oriented languages here--transition from OO to a functional language is a bit different).

This is a problem.

ie- Can't be productive in another language... Finds Rails, thinks he/she is a genius. Anyone can consider himself or herself a professional artist, but that doesn’t make it so.

I'm trying to fight being mean, but Ffff!!

I think I have seen this argument before, that X is somehow obscure, in the sense that all those lame workaday cororate drones don't use it, so it must follow that all the most awesome people gravitate towards it. I'm not sure I buy it. Sometimes stuff is obscure because it sucks. It would also follow that using the most obscure language possible would make you the most awesome. Sort of like inventing a sport in order to ensure you are the best in the world.I'm also ignoring the fact that there seem to be a million rails based sites out there, they were not all done by an elite cadre of the best of the best of the best were they?

careful, some of those dime-a-dozen java devs are solving way harder problems than the hipsters and their rails CMSs. strong rails hipsters grow up to be VP of some ycombinator webapp. strong enterprise devs grow up to become VP at google.

Never underestimate the importance of your ability to self motivate and learn. Even the most exciting projects contain mind numbing tasks.

This is the money quote for me, if you are programming because you love programming, you find a level of self motivation in that joy. Have you ever heard/seen a programmer excitedly running through the source code base and changing all the calls to a particular subsystem to use a new syntax/set of parameters because how 'cool it was going to be' when this was in place? Here they are doing tons of 'crap' work because they are excited about the system will look in the end. Whereas people who really don't love programming won't even start on changing a routine if it means they are going to go back and change everything that calls it, because of all the 'drudge' work.

That difference in attitude has a huge impact on their productivity.

"They also tend to be musically inclined; As in, a lot of them play instruments."

Fascinating -- I play three instruments. I never noticed a correlation before.

tl;dr -- young rails fanboi thinks it's the greatest thing since sliced bread... doesn't know tim toady...

Why the so-proud rails-guy use wordpress in his blog?

"If I had only a few words to generalise them, it would be curious, determined, intelligent, and collaborators. They also tend to be musically inclined; As in, a lot of them play instruments."

I don't know for the rest, but yes I do play piano :-)