"Works" is not the same as "works fabulously." Import statements and public main void() are not, in my opinion, "fabulous" in any way -- except possibly "fabulo

"Works" is not the same as "works fabulously." Import statements and public main void() are not, in my opinion, "fabulous" in any way -- except possibly "fabulously bad." I started with BASIC. I learned PERL and did some CGI stuff with it. Then I learned PHP. I used PHP for a long time, and would rate myself as expert level, especially based on writing good solid OOP code and using good OOP principles. Now, I was happy with what I could do with it... until I wasn't. It worked, but not fabulously. Then I saw some Rails controller code, my jaw dropped, and I knew I had to learn it. My growth as a PHP dev had been, in retrospect, largely about mitigating the crappiness of PHP. Ruby is a different ballgame altogether. I haven't had that experience with anything else since. Probably some day it will happen. But til then, the only complaint I've possibly got against Ruby/Rails/Sinatra is that deployment is not the easiest thing... and that's an ancillary problem I rarely have to deal with. Most of the other things are new for the sake of being new. I looked into Seaside over 2 years ago. I find it cumbersome, and I asked a question at a Seaside talk, similar to one of the other commentors here, about the templating -- which has to be done that way for the object/state serializations -- and Avi Bryant was a dick to me, to boot. I'm sure it works great for what he's doing, but it doesn't appeal to me. I don't need or want to write revolutionary data transformation software. I want to write the best damn webapps for "boring, simple" problems that everyone else thinks are solved -- that have yet, in my mind, to ever be given a thoughtful, amazing UI. So Ruby and Rails are practically custom-made for me -- and, as I said, they work fabulously.