1) it is a comprehensive and easy to pick up stack, at least for proficiency at a jr. level that a coding school would churn out in 3 months
2) it was hot at the time of the rise of the bootcamps, so from a marketing perspective would attract top students
3) RoR shops would be more amenable than most to taking on bootcamp grads and continue to embrace a mentor/mentee relationship for long-term success
I think largely #3 is the reason for the switch - bootcamps have now been shown to be a valid source for jr. devs and the enterprise is open to it, hence making java curriculum worthwhile - it certainly will scale better. We're still stuck on #1 though...
Of course they ditch Ruby/RoR if their customers want to learn the tech that is in demand.
You seem to be agreeing with the article but disagreeing over phrasing?
Ruby and Rails aren't special anymore, there's lots of other languages which can do the same thing but have huge advantages. Then again, that was the case going back to 2007 (Pylons is but one example - the Rails template on a better VM and with more libraries available and none of the bloat and magic). Rails has always been about hype and that hype doesn't matter when other stacks have 10x the performance and are just as productive.
Brb, gonna go kill some zombie fcgi processes.
Otherwise, there's nothing there other stacks don't have. Scaffolding generation, validation, command line tools, good templating, routing, routing for apis, ORMs, etc, that stuff is built into almost any framework these days and if it isn't it is because you are using a microframework by choice. You have dozens of frameworks across various languages that approach the functionality of Rails.
Django is certainly very comparable, and a good Django dev can pump out apps as quickly as a Rails dev. Stacks in other languages are doing things Rails is incapable of and they have borrowed all of the benefits (because Rails does a lot of things right).
You had the same routing, you had very very fast templating in Mako, the best ORM in the business in SQLAlchemy, all of the tooling around Rails (scaffolding, testing, etc) and the best part of it was it was all designed to be easily swappable. Didn't like the files that were getting generated with your project? Tweak Paste. Different templating system? Few lines of code to be swapped out.
It was a very forward-thinking and well-designed framework at a time when the Python VM was much better than Ruby. Feature for feature it was better than Rails, it just wasn't as popular.