[Nursie]

I used it a few times.

You could draw a frontend easily. You could glue together fairly high level components trivially. You could connect window/component/widget clicks and actions to code trivially. Want a thing that sits in the systray, scans a directory for new files, reads lines out of them and spews them out somewhere over the network? Easy. Make a test frontend that calls a bunch of scripts and dumps the results in a grid? Done.

It had a bad rep because in a lot of ways it felt like a toy, and because a lot of bad software was written in it by people that didn't really know what they were doing. OTOH that also made it a really accessible first step for some folks.

[karterk]

In many ways, Rails is the new VB. A little hyperbolic, perhaps, but I see a similar mindset when people ignore the language Ruby and live only in the world of Rails, eventually leading to shitty code.

[Argorak]

It doesn't necessarily lead to shitty code. There, it is a question of how good he is a _race car driving_.

(For those that don't want to click the link: (turing-unaware) race car drivers are programmers that know a single high-level technology very well, but are unaware of the things that the technology is based on. Somehow like Formula 1-drivers.)

https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/age-racecar-driver

[robin_reala]

Interesting link: David Hansson, creator of Rails, is also a professional race car driver.

http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/#driver

[tokenizerrr]

It was an amazing first step into the world of programming for me.

[samspenc]

Me too!!! Agreed it wasn't the greatest language - but man, you could build standard Windows UI with drag and drop!