[chipotle_coyote]

I've been (re-)learning Rails now that it's at version 6 instead of... 2.x, I think, when I last tried it? I've been joking that now that Rails is no longer cool, it means the people left are probably settling down to do serious work.

While I think you're right about the elitism hype cycle, I do think Rails and PHP have something in common, though -- they were systems that people who really weren't that interested in learning how to program leapt into in droves, because they were both perceived as "anyone can learn to code" technologies. And that led to an awful lot of bad code written with PHP and with Rails, which in turn contributed to the buzz about both turning sour.

[joelbluminator]

They both try to lower the bar for a person to become a productive web developer. Dhh (Rails creator) calls it "conceptual compression". But in reality, to build anything half mature you not only have to know how to program, you also have to understand the concepts Rails supposedly compresses. The complexity is still there. The best example I have for this fallacy is the notion that ActiveRecord can make SQL obsolete thus make the framework easier for beginners. Dhh advocates this and it's absolute horse shit. But yes, both Rails and php are beginner friendly, that has pros and cons and comes with a reputation.