Continuing my thoughts on Ruby - I think there's something that definitely has to be said. Everybody is praising Ruby (and Rails) these days. How productive it makes you. How well integrated is with Ajax. How easy is to reuse and extend. Everything indicates that Ruby is a revelation. Is this truly the case?

In my previous Ruby post, I was thinking about the complexity of the language itself. Sean Corfield joined my view and also - positive echos were heard in the Adobe blogosphere.

So I come with a new hypothesis. Ruby on Rails is famous because the people that invented it and the ones that use it are very bright. I mean, Ruby is all about Regular expressions, about Active Records, about versioning, about inheritance, about encapsulation and model-view-controller approaches. The ones that understand the concepts above are very good programmers or even architects. There's no wonder they are productive. There's no wonder their sites are usable and functional. There's no wonder they are successful!

Think about the rest of the world. What made Visual Basic great? Simplicity. What made Java great? OOP and code clarity. Who made .NET great? Nobody - I'm kidding with this one :). But cryptic code and extremely complex concepts don't make a framework great. It only makes it elitist.

Who's to blame for the success? The developer or the framework?