JS may be released in 1995 but it was not used much for anything except changing status bar messages, or image rollovers (remember those?) for at least ten year

JS may be released in 1995 but it was not used much for anything except changing status bar messages, or image rollovers (remember those?) for at least ten years. Sure there also was Microsofts DHTML on IE, which failed to get much traction. Only starting with GMail and AJAX in 2004-2005 JS started to be treated seriously, it still took some years and SPA hype to become "a must". So about ten years max. Also Rails was constantly evolving since inception, alas, a lot of JS is revolving, i.e. solving the same problems over and over again, just with different approaches. The last point would be that people initially taking up Rails were not new to programming and usually switched from PHP or Java. Now Javascript is often the first (alas, often the only) language people learn. So I'd say the culture is quite different.