Great points. It’s obviously a much easier step to get WebForms developers onto ASP.NET MVC than it is to get them onto Ruby on Rails, so that’s probably a more realistic step for most teams.

You mentioned yourself an example in which a factor of 2 improvement was achieved in the .NET environment - when transitioning to ASP.NET MVC. So there you have seen a 2x improvement without changing platform. With hindsight, we can say that the old way of doing things was slow (at least, for the kinds of projects that you were working on).

This raises two questions:
- how do we know that ASP.NET MVC is “as good as it gets” (i.e. that we cannot get even faster in .NET)? (Are we even trying to do so? What would it mean to try, to look for such opportunities?)
- secondly, these people who say Rails is 4x faster: what are they comparing it to? The new ways of doing things in .NET, the old ways, or old ways of doing things in Java (which anecdotally may be even slower still)?

In summary, I’m suggesting that the comparison should be a driver to further improved the .NET platform, not (only) a driver to consider Rails.

It’s not entirely helpless, but it will be an uphill battle. I haven’t been around long enough to attest to this first-hand, but I’d imagine this was the cycle with many new tech stacks. Surely people scoffed at .NET as an untested upstart that had no place in a Java-dominated industry. And before that, people surely dismissed Java as an inefficient toy that had no place in the serious C/C++ dominated industry.

Times change, and those type of companies are always the last ones to jump on the bandwagon. I love that anecdote about a team that went rogue and did a project in RoR in 4 months that would take 18 in Java. To me, that’s an amazing testament to the power of that framework, and it should be the evidence needed to drive change. In reality, the chances that it drove change vs. the developers got reprimanded/fired is depressingly close to 50/50.

So what am I trying to say? I think you shouldn’t be as dismissive of Ruby [on Rails] as those companies you loathe for their inaction. Try it out at home, or start using it in parallel for internal tasks (build with Rake, test with IronRuby and Cucumber/RSpec, etc). Then, as the saying goes, “change your company, or change your company.”

I too hear these sorts of anecdotes on a regular basis, but I must admit bias as I’ve also experienced them personally and through the success of many of my company’s customers.

Many large companies are beginning to adopt Ruby on Rails. Some are trialing it formally, many others have “rogue” groups trying to get things done, and others have picked up Rails through acquisitions.

It takes time for things to happen, but it IS happening. Perhaps one of the biggest roadblocks is the old proverb: If it’s too good to be true, it’s probably not true!

Both fortunately and unfortunately for Rails, it is that good, and it is true. :-)