[marjoram]

Ironically, I think that's part of the reason it became trendy to hate on Ruby and Rails: they make it really easy to do things, which means they also make it really easy to do ill-advised things. But that's not really the fault of the lanaguage or the framework - writing good and maintainable code is a skill you need to work at and develop over time, no matter what language you're using.

[smoyer]

Ruby is a beautiful language - Rails is opinionated (much like its creator). If the ways Rails is opinionated works well with your use-case, it's wonderful to use but if not, it's simply horrible.

I don't think RoR usage has declined (maybe as evidenced by the number of "I'm a newb" comments here?) but rather think it's become mainstream so it's simply missing the hype it had when it was the new hipster technology.

[ljm]

It's not so different to the same kind of elitism that gives, say, PHP or JS a bad rap.

They just happen to be successful, and popular.

I don't think the trope of Ruby being old and boring is such a bad thing either, it just means it's stabilised and has a strong ecosystem that requires little to no effort to get set up. And it still gets a lot of love with every Christmas release adding something desirable and new.

I also think it will require some immense innovation or paradigm shift to unseat Ruby/Rails as a de-facto framework for rapid web prototyping. I would still kick off a project with Rails in favour of trying to early-adopt some new approach to development.