Why Would a .NET Programmer Learn Ruby on Rails

Googling around for some Rails issues the other day, I stumbled upon this interesting article:

http://www.infoq.com/articles/Netter-on-Rails

I find it interesting, mostly because I went from a Rails project to a .NET project with absolutely no .NET experience. The result is frustrating! Stephen Chu (the author of the article, who happens to be a fellow ThoughtWorker) talks about how Rails lets you get to the meat and potatoes of the software, instead of having to fuss around with trivial things, like O/R Mapping, AJAX, DB Migrations, deployment. These things come standard with Ruby on Rails, but do not come cheap with .NET. Now, I shouldn’t single out .NET, because you have the same issues with Java. I’m merely using it as an example.

I’m not a huge fan of programming fan wars. There was an interesting comment on that article that said

I think many developers actually believe the drill is more important than the hole that it creates.

Isn’t that so true! We silly nerdy, geeky, techies get so caught up in the technology we’re using , that we forget about the problem that we’re trying to solve! As far as programmers go, I think we absolutely SHOULD try new languages, new frameworks, new platforms. Not necessarily because they may be “better”, but because it may be a better way of solving the current problem you have.

P.S. I keep hearing that RoR is great, but not for an enterprise app. I don’t know if I believe that yet. I have to do more research.