Back in the olden days, maybe about 20 years ago, two web frameworks were really starting to change the way a lot of people thought about web development. Not the people at the company I worked for, sadly, which is why I went to work for someone else, but there you go.

These were Django, and Ruby on Rails. I already knew Python, and Django was really well-written, and had great documentation, and I could get going with it really quickly. If the docs didn't explain it, I could read the source code. Super.

The place worked at hired a guy who was big into Ruby on Rails, and I really wanted to like it. I liked the stuff the guy was doing, he seemed like a decent sort, and all, and I'm not egotistical enough to go "No we will use my thing" if someone has a perfectly good alternative. Well, okay, I am that egotistical, but not in this case. The point is, I didn't really care which framework we used although I was already able to write Python, because anything was better than the hideous ball of unstructured PHP4 intermingled with HTML that the company's sites were written in at the time.

I really really wanted to like Ruby on Rails, but the documentation kind of assumed you already knew a lot about Ruby and indeed Rails. Okay, let's learn some Ruby.

The IRC channel pointed me at some video tutorials you had to pay for because "that's the future, everyone watches videos to learn stuff now", and why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby.

I did not like w(P)GtR, at all. I didn't like the "I'm so wackywackywacky" humour on every page. I didn't particularly care about the dog story, which put me off the rest of the whole chapter. I've tried reading it again, maybe about five times since, and I just do not get on with that American Gibberish Poem style of writing.

(I don't much like Alan Ginsberg either, FWIW).

Then the whole Basecamp thing blew up, and DHH was widely known as a total shithead from the motor racing scene so it's not surprising that he turned out to basically be the sort of person my grandfather would have shot if he'd been around in the 1940s.

So, that's kind of why I've never got on with Ruby, much as I'd like to.