Rails seems to be focused on it's own navel. It's written by developers to solve problems developers perceive they have. The platform rewards new layers of abstraction within the community - and those layers really exist to enforce a discipline which may not be needed and becomes restrictive if you don't want to do things the Rails way.
From my perspective as a serial startup founder, I won't touch the platform because startups must innovate or die and to enforce too much discipline on the way things are done within a platform is to risk killing innovation.
The best startups not only use platforms in unexpected ways, but are platform agnostic and use multiple platforms that probably didn't expect to have to talk to each other.
Startups choosing Rails need to remember that 37Signals have a group of mature apps that are maintaining and incrementally improving with (I'm guessing) growing team of devs. Their apps are also B2B and have relatively low traffic compared to many consumer focused startups. Their focus is code and team scaleability. They aren't rapidly prototyping or rapidly innovating. Also as the center of the Rails community, they don't need to care that Ruby devs are harder to come by than PHP or more mainstream languages.
Rails also strikes me as a rockstar dev culture that puts marketing, innovation and being perceived as a thought leader ahead of everything else, including the boring crap like productivity, simplicity and performance:
From my perspective as a serial startup founder, I won't touch the platform because startups must innovate or die and to enforce too much discipline on the way things are done within a platform is to risk killing innovation.
The best startups not only use platforms in unexpected ways, but are platform agnostic and use multiple platforms that probably didn't expect to have to talk to each other.
Startups choosing Rails need to remember that 37Signals have a group of mature apps that are maintaining and incrementally improving with (I'm guessing) growing team of devs. Their apps are also B2B and have relatively low traffic compared to many consumer focused startups. Their focus is code and team scaleability. They aren't rapidly prototyping or rapidly innovating. Also as the center of the Rails community, they don't need to care that Ruby devs are harder to come by than PHP or more mainstream languages.
Rails also strikes me as a rockstar dev culture that puts marketing, innovation and being perceived as a thought leader ahead of everything else, including the boring crap like productivity, simplicity and performance:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/46457493@N00/4441909186/in/set-...