Not so long ago, before the rise of Node.js and when it seemed like Rails was The Way of the Future (tm) and everyone was really down on PHP, I used to joke tha

Not so long ago, before the rise of Node.js and when it seemed like Rails was The Way of the Future (tm) and everyone was really down on PHP, I used to joke that there was a silver lining to PHP becoming the next COBOL: there weren't many COBOL jobs around, but there also weren't many COBOL programmers around, and if you needed a COBOL programmer the chances were that you really needed a COBOL programmer. As things have played out, PHP has done pretty well at modernizing (I know some would debate that, but that's a different thread), and Rails has faded a bit into the background -- although now I joke that because Rails is well out of its fad phase, it can get down to the real work. I do wonder whether Rails has been kind of a mixed blessing for Ruby all in all, though. I think Ruby is, in itself, a great alternative to Python or Perl, and it's the language I reach for first when I'm writing short utility scripts -- but since Rails exploded in popularity before Ruby itself did, a lot of Ruby programmers really only know Ruby to the degree they know Rails.