John Nunemaker was already “happy” developing application in Cold Fusion and PHP, so why bother learning a new language like Ruby? Or so went his thinking, until he saw the new 15 minute intro movie:

Within three to four minutes of viewing the intro, my jaw had dropped and I was beginning to giggle and snort as only a geek can. My mind began to race and when I say race, I mean I almost had a melt down. It looked so easy. I cleared my already empty Friday night schedule (Steph was shopping with her mom) and decided to go through a tutorial and give RoR a shot.

John went on to create his first simple Rails application in just an hour. It’s not only serving as an experience to get to know Ruby on Rails, but also a gentle way to be introduced to great practices for web development. Like using Model-View-Control.

I really like the idea of Ruby on Rails being a way of introducing great practices and patterns to a larger pool of developers who might not be working with them already. By lowering the learning curve of the infrastructure, the good development manners are much easier to sell.