[jgw]

Thanks for the insight.

I guess what I was really getting at is the folks who know Rails, but not Ruby. If you don't know the language underlying your own framework, it seems unlikely that you'll know much else, language-wise (like C, for instance). I'd be loathe to call someone who doesn't really know any programming language a programmer at all.

It almost seems like the arrogance alluded to by many posters in this thread comes from using a framework that is itself perhaps a work of genius, as if that somehow implies that merely using it is genius, too.

The other thing that surprised me in that post was "the barrier to entry with learning rails is a little tricky". In the context of all the flak that the "Java schools" (which seems to be all of them, now) get for not weeding out weak programmers, I would have guessed that learning Rails would be even easier. Comparison to PHP doesn't seem like a very good yardstick for aptitude.

[ejames]

I think there are two types of claims typically made in the "people who use X are better/worse programmers than people who don't" argument.

One is a claim based on difficulty. X is really hard, so if you can use it successfully, you must be an excellent programmer.

Another is a claim based on taste. You must be very sophisticated and knowledgeable in order to see why X is good, so people who choose X are excellent programmers, because they know the difference between good and bad technologies.

I tend to feel that you shouldn't take credit for having good taste in frameworks (or text editors, or etc.) until you have worked with more than one. Otherwise, even if you pick the 'best' one right off the bat, it was mostly luck.