[taskstrike]

Rails is still a ghetto. Out of most programmers, Rails is the one with people with the least amount of CS degrees.

While there might be great rail programmers who know there CS basics. A lot don't

[zedshaw]

Well to be honest, there's a lot of people with CS degrees that don't know the fundamentals of basic CS either. I know, it sounds crazy, but you'll frequently run into people who graduate from reasonably top notch schools and have never heard of simple things like ternary search trees or suffix arrays, or even state machines.

In my experience I find that nearly all practicing programmers simply don't know a lot of important basics about building software or even how a computer works.

[rbanffy]

> have never heard of simple things

Or much worse: have heard, can answer questions about them, and still can't code themselves out of a paper bag.

[taskstrike]

I think because of the simplicity and approachability of Rails, almost anyone can pick it up and build a functioning website.

Rails is a niche that has a low barrier to entry. I doubt you can write an article that says: High frequency trading is a ghetto.

[rbanffy]

I have long lost count of CS masters that can't write 5 lines of code during a job interview.

Fair disclosure: I'm an engineer (I was trained to build computers instead of programming them). I've been programming professionally since 1987 and, among the top programmers I've met since then, two biologists, one engineer, one physicist, one ichthyologist and several ones who never graduated college, figure prominently.