I taught myself Ruby and Rails on my couch, by myself, over years. But I did it after a more-than-ten-year C/C++ career. I continued to be amazed and nonpluss

I taught myself Ruby and Rails on my couch, by myself, over years. But I did it after a more-than-ten-year C/C++ career. I continued to be amazed and nonplussed that a community could do so well and know so many technologies so fluently when I took so long to learn them. And now that I've met a bunch of Rails people in person and am considered a Rails guru by two consecutive companies, I'll tell you that yeah, it's mostly hype. Not that Rails is bad -- it rocks. But it requires a lot of background in deep, messy Ruby to really do well, and there's a lot of bad Ruby and Rails code out there. How could it be otherwise?