Agree that Yehuda is calm and makes good points - However the main point of the original article still remains intact - Rails is very hard for the beginner to learn, much harder than before.
I think that Rails is hard to learn for several reasons:
* unless you've used it before, you have to learn Ruby too
* Rails is fast moving and has a lot of pieces
* the error messages can be cryptic and hard to decipher
I've been developing with Ruby and Rails for several years now and I still encounter cryptic error messages.
As a newbie I found it incredibly frustrating when Google did not bring up an immediate answer, it basically built a brick wall around me. I don't think this is Rails' fault per se, it's just the nature of the beast.
I have found those additions worthwhile. The work I've done in Django has gone a _lot_ faster, and I think better written, for the orientation to REST and TDD.
Perhaps real devs with more experience find these pieces less helpful and more intrusive?
Point being, Rails' first priority is to improve developers' productivity, sanity and happiness - all developers using it, not just new ones.
I'm not by any means a Rails fan, and think that even now, it feels like a PHP framework. (I have a "competing" web framework that I wrote and use whenever I have the flexibility, if you can call it a competitor; it's not actively promoted and the users number in the low single digits). But they do deserve credit for making sure that it's easy to figure out how to get things done.
compared to what? Have you tried to learn Spring MVC? No way rails is harder to learn than that. Are you comparing it to no-framework php files?
Forgive me, but I fail to see how the main point of the original article is even valid.