Brett at San Antonio Safe List recalls the process that he has seen folks with PHP, Python, Java, and DBA experience go through when meeting Rails:

1. Everything is so weird.
   
2. Everyone is really annoyed by Rails’ “black magic” where all this stuff just happens for you.
   
3. People realize that programming tasks are handled in a single line.
   
4. They have to lookup how to do something Ruby.
   
5. They realize how much faster they are building things.
   
6. They forget about all other languages and stop saying “Well in Java I’d do this…In python it works like this…Thats just like the ternary operator in Perl…”
   
7. They wonder why in the hell that hadn’t been playing with this a year ago.
   
8. They’re on Rails.</ol>