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As opposed to what?

At the time, Java. J2EE (entity beans and session beans), Java Server Pages, Apache Struts. I think it's hard for people who didn't live through it to appreciate just how painful it was to work in that stack circa 1999-2003, like it just doesn't seem plausible that the whole industry would go along with a stack with that much boilerplate for that little added value.

Back then, Ruby and Rails opened a lot of people's minds to the idea that we were allowed to make "delightful" a consideration in API design, not just S.O.L.I.D. or whatever. These days, there are way more mainstream languages, frameworks, and communities that take humane APIs seriously.

Putting aside the fact that this is about ruby vs other languages, not rails vs other frameworks, I cannot help but feel like ruby optimizes for fitting code onto slide decks rather than other human concerns (like, unambiguous communication of semantics at a glance).

I certainly have written a great deal of ruby and have no strong opinions about the language aside from "I will shoot the next person who uses method_missing", but I find the people who do have strong attraction to the language endlessly fascinating. By far, the most human aspect of the language is the community built around it.

A.I. obviously.

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