Steven R. Baker was “…depressed by web development”, but he also pretty sure that “…sophisticated applications wouldn’t be any easier to build with Rails”. So what did he do? He gave it a try:

So I did what any self-respecting skeptic would do: I set out to prove those Rails folks wrong. I was asked to write a web application for customer and work order management. I decided that this would be a good chance to learn Rails, and prove those Rails folks wrong. Rolling with Ruby on Rails told me that I would write web applications ten times faster using Rails. I prepared a schedule as though I was writing the app with PHP, and quoted my client one quarter of the estimated time (three weeks). In the space of that three weeks I went from having not written a line of Ruby outside of text book examples, to developing a fully functioning (and mostly tested) Rails application for a client.

The borg is at work. Baker finishes off with:

In mid January, I set out to prove those rails folks wrong. Now I’m one of them. Prove me wrong.