The people who learned with Rails always make me chuckle. The only reason Rails got anywhere was because of scaffolding and the hype that surrounded it - which of course already existed in some form in other platforms. It's completely revisionist to think that platforms like Java or .NET didn't already have application creators and ORM.

The genius of Rails and DHH was the marketing which isn't surprising seeing as how much he loves Apple for it. They can always try to say the other platforms were bloated, but this is coming from people who thought full Unicode support at launch wasn't necessary.