[hoipaloi]

I'm gonna disagree with

"Ruby got popular coz Rails could get barely code-literate graduate to write CRUD app and so it was cheap (famous 15 minutes to blog tutorial) for companies."

That's not what happened, instead Ruby got popular with advanced web developers working in Java who saw that Rails was had better answers than J2EE. If you were barely code-literate graduate you wouldn't recognize that Rails was offering new unique ways doing things.

The 15 minute blog tutorial wasn't really indicative of what Rails was like, just a small sample about how it was different.

It was an advanced tool for advanced users with a long learning curve that eventually paid off in better productivity.

[michaelteter]

> advanced web developers working in Java who saw that Rails was had better answers than J2EE

I was not "advanced" at web development in 2006, but this is exactly what got me to try Ruby. Previously I had been reasonably happy with JSP and Java Servlets, but this Rails thing promised a better way. And it turned out for most of my needs, it was much better.

Also, the Rails Depot book was excellent, even back in the 1.x days (IIRC). It covered enough that you could build a fully working app with sessions, auth, crud, and reasonably abstracted layouts/views. Oh, and because Ruby was "simple", you honestly could start with that Rails book without knowing Ruby.

[pjmlp]

I was doing J2EE and was hardly surprised with Rails.

We did Rails one decade earlier with our own version of AOLServer.

The very reason we went to .NET (as beta testers during its availability only to MSFT partners) was because we were fed up having to rewrite TCL into C due to performance issues.

All the Active Record stuff was already something that AOLServer introduced, and we had an improved approach on our product.

The founders of that company went on to create OutSystems based on our learnings.