I have no idea why haploid's comment went dead - he raises a very good point. RoR, for better or worse, has become the trendy tool to use for web apps. Java, once upon a time, did occupy that niche, too.
- worse, IMO
- worse, IMO
One thing I cant remember ever having read is a horror story about people taking over a legacy Rails app, while those stories seem to be fairly common when talking about Java apps.
Seems to me that, for the most part, people who know Ruby and Rails have taught themselves, while sub-par and mediocre Java programmers are produced in their hundreds, fresh from their first programming experience in college.
Seems logical to me then that its going to be far easier to get experienced Ruby programmers than to get experienced Java programmers.
Bad code can be written in any language or on any framework. I would suggest, however, that when at larger scales, there are significant benefits to a more restrictive language and tool set. I write Java at work, and while there are cases where it's not as expressive as I'd like (s'why I write my own code in C#, which is as expressive as I'd like), reducing the ability of developers to Do Stupid Things is, to me, a very large plus.
The claim that people who know Ruby and Rails have taught themselves--well, no shit, right? I taught myself Java, too. And C#. And PHP, Python, Ruby, and half a dozen other languages. Of course sub-par and mediocre Java developers are churned out by college. So what? Hire ones who aren't. And if you give it ten years (assuming the Rails fad has legs--I'm skeptical, but just for argument's sake let's assume it's not) colleges will be churning out mediocre Ruby hacks just as well.
Your comment reads as fanboyism and not much more.