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The prose style in this article was tough to follow. It was not an easy read despite being a strait forward point.

planetmcd,

I can see why you would say that. I write like I think, and like I talk. It can make the text hard to follow. I'll keep that in mind for future postings. Thanx for the feedback, bro!

Cliff76,
I was not trying to be harsh (I did not put in a complaint), and I think you took the comment the way I intended it.

As a Java developer who has moved onto Ruby/Rails, I can say that the syntax of Java was less a reason to switch to Ruby than the facility of the Rails framework compared to Spring MVC or Struts. Rails provides a comprehensive solution for many web applications, without lots of complexity. It was after I started playing with Rails that I realized Ruby was pretty powerful. The economy of code is useful and I find the transition from Java was easy. Ruby and Rails isn't the answer for everything, and your larger point that people who don't want to move from Java, or can't (which I think is more likely for office political reasons, or tied to specific java packages which don't have Ruby equivalents yet) have avenues available for them which can increase their productivity. This point is weakend by the jumping around in the prose, which is too bad because its a valid point. You'll notice the pro-ruby commentators show/correct your Ruby syntax, not your point. If made more clearly, a great deal more people would value from your knowledge, and making a point clear, often helps you to understand it better.

Enough of me sounding like a high school English teacher.

My apologies for not providing a better initial response.

Who are these Java developers that the "Rubyists" are targeting that only know Java and never want to do anything else? The great majority of Java devs I know are at least fluent in 3-4 programming languages, most of them scripting languages...

Who are these ilazartes who post comments about articles without reading the articles?

planetmcd,

No offense taken. To be honest I really don't consider this one of my better pieces of writing while I do consider it one of the more important pieces of content on my site. It's interesting to hear stories like yours where Rails was the deciding factor. (As I understand, Rails was out prior to Grails.) I wonder how much of an impact the initial release of Grails would have on like minded developers that are currently considering switching.

Planet is right on the money. It's Rails that is the hammer behind RoR; Ruby is like Michael Jackson -- around in the 90's. It's Rails that got released 2 years ago and that created the hype.

The thing that both java and RoR camps don't want to admit is that there is no silver bullet; it's all about the right tool for the job.

IMHO though, Django is the stuff. B/c of the Admin interface, it saved a whole man day in this comparison http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dcn8282p_1hg4sr9 I can create my schema by updating my models.py and doing 'syncdb' w/out going back and forth b/w MySQL administrator + in the benchmarks it's faster.

I just looked briefly at Django and it really looks impressive, as far as Rails alternatvies go. (I mentioned in one of my articles that I'm not too crazy about frameworks that elevate the importance of an underlying DBMS schema but that just MHO.) Django seems different, though. I'll do my fair share of research on this as well as Python. Thanx again to all for the feedback.