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Interesting read, but pretty outdated in parts (Rails the only alternative for web development in Ruby? These days there seem to be a new framework every day, and lots of us are complaining about why people feel the need for frameworks in the first place)

Agreed on being somewhat dated: for example, I think that Netbeans, RadRails and IntelliJ (and I'm sure others) offer credible Ruby/Rails IDE options, say, for someone coming from Java. Also, I think that whether or not you think Rails is mainstream depends on your definition of mainstream and how you personally approach technology adoption. To my way of thinking, Ruby on Rails become mainstream approximately two years ago, and the more interesting question now is how long it will *stay* in the mainstream.

This is an older post, but most of the points the author is making still ring true. When you limit the argument to "mainstream adoption rates", Ruby (and RoR) will never achieve the level of acceptance that PHP has in recent years. It has nothing to do with features and functionality, or even my personal preference, but it primarily has to do with how easy it is for the majority of Web developers to use every day. Even though it has been marketed as such, I don't think RoR is for your average developer -- I actually consider it instead to be a well thought out attempt at replacing enterprise languages like Java or .NET.

Old post indeed (mid 2006) but how much of it still holds true ? the comments contain a lot of insight

This is like reading a java-will-never-supplant-C++ post from 1998. Post new content.

This is pretty old. I hadn't even noticed I read and commented on it until mid-way through! Although I'd prefer newer content, it's interesting to see that many points are still true two years later.

"[Ruby is] a complex language that contains a lot of advanced idioms which will be very hard for PHP and Visual Basic programmers to absorb."

Such bullshit. You don't have to anything near the tricks that Rails employs in its implementation to use Rails or Ruby.

"Ruby on Rails is just too advanced. I'm serious. ... it's still a very wide gap for corporate developers to cross. Sometimes, too much magic is too much magic, and it can definitely be the case that the flow of code is too direct or too clever to be understandable by regular developers."

Yes, too direct. I hate that in code. This guy is on sherm.

"Granted, Java took a while to rise to the enterprise challenge as well, and it did so despite tremendous initial handicaps such as poor performances and questionable specifications. I contend that until Rails goes through its own EJB2 debacle, it won't be seen as enterprise ready."

Um, Sun focused on making Java 'enterprise ready' and I don't care how you feel about Java the language, they succeeded as a platform. RoR hasn't shown that it wants to compete in this space at all. Witness how painful integration with anything else has been. It's way better than anything Java has for prototyping or making a simple thin layer over a database though.