I learned Rails because it was way better than PHP. I had a colleague show it to me and was amazed at how much simpler things can be when you have your ORM, MVC

I learned Rails because it was way better than PHP. I had a colleague show it to me and was amazed at how much simpler things can be when you have your ORM, MVC, templating, configuration all set up in an opinionated framework. As for whether or not you should learn it today - maybe? I think there's still a future for Rails development. It's more of a workhorse now than the Hot New Thing. I think if you're looking for something new, look for things that you (or others) get excited about, because they are way better then the current way. Learning Rails was because it was 10x better than the PHP spaghetti shit that I was personally coding in early 2010s. I think this can apply to a lot of trends. For me, Golang was a much much better way to handle concurrency. Add typing, strong performance, compilation. It's also on an upward trend that I was on the leading edge of. These days I'm learning Rust because I think the borrow checker is an interesting and much better way to handle memory than manually allocating/freeing, pointers, or slow GC. However, who knows if it will take off. Similar things have happened with frontend. From what I understand React is much much better than coding together stuff with jQuery and random plugins.