Personally to me all languages are essentially the same: to convey an idea. The idea maybe a business problem, or a social network site, or anything. At least for the web, everything has to spit out the final HTML. On the client side, Javasript does the user interaction. The there must be some data exchange between the client and the server. And the server part handles the calculation to again spit out more HTML. Everything .NET or Java is capable of doing, Cobol can also do it, only with more code and lots of efforts.

I believe that we are just talking about solving a problems in different tongues. Since no *sane* people would do web development in Cobol, we invent more stuff to make the job of the developer easier. We have .NET, Java, Python, Ruby, etc. From strongly to dynamically typed, the point is to make the developer more productive and effective at solving the problems at hand.

Since in the end, most languages are the same (talking about the same thing), now the different frameworks would be another story: which framework can help the developer solve the problem the fastest will be more likely to win. I would say there will be more frameworks providing more elegant ways to solve more difficult problems, with Rails pave the way for the next revolution of programming.

We developers have suffered too much from trying to talk in a foreign tongue and have to write poem in it. It can be done, but painful, costly, and slow. I just hate to see myself do the b*tchwork every single time just to be able to query the database and retrieve some rows. How many hoops do I have to jump within .NET to do so? While in Rails, everything can be a 1-liner. That is a huge different between using a light saber and a stone hammer to get the job done. For the mass of developers out here trying to make a living, the framework that allows them to finish the project the fastest with less pain will win. Be it Python, Ruby, Javascript, .NET, Java, or any other platform: does it matter? The most flexible framework using any of these languages will be the answer.

In five years you might be using the same software stack because you invested in it today (and over the intervening five years) and it’s hard to change. This is probably more true of some investments than others. For instance, I spent the last 10 or so years doing web development on Lotus Noets & Domino. (It makes easy stuff easy, but hard stuff a pain in the rear.) It is (in my opinion) hard to switch away from for several reasons:
1) it’s so different from everything else, so it’s hard to make a jump to a different platform
2) it offers features that nothing else really quite matches, so despite its pain points there are things that are hard to give up
3) it tends to be used by BIG companies, which are slow to change no matter what.

I’ve made the switch to working primarily with Ruby (requiring a coordinated change in clientele!) and find that certain mental transitions are difficult. It’s like an English speaker learning Latin and having to figure out declensions. English is verbose, and sloppy, and inconsistent, and lets you express anything a bazillion different ways, while Latin seems to be fairly consistent and principled. (Perhaps I think that because I don’t know it well enough, but that’s another matter.) So take the obstacles for one person to make the change and multiple them across a whole company.

I’ve been eyeing other technologies for a long time. I kind of skipped the Perl wave back in the mid 90s, even though I found it very interesting–there just weren’t any opportunities for me to use it and get paid for it, so gaining any proficiency was not realistic. I flirted much longer and harder with Java, but you can’t really learn something well until you use it in real-world projects. (At least that’s my experience.) I looked at Rails for a long time before deciding this was the right move to make. And I’m not likely to give up that investment of thought and effort so quickly.

So I might be using Rails for the next 10 years…

Also, regarding JavaScript: you’re right in everything you point out, but I think it’s important to also notice that people using JavaScript for the browser is often (most often?) using a layer on top of it that makes it much easier and much more Ruby-like. Take Prototype and Scriptaculous, or jQuery. Programming with those hide so much from you that much of it ends up looking (to my mind) more like Ruby than like JavaScript. I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that gets carried over to things like AIR and ActionScript. (Just a wild guess… since I know next to nothing about those two things.)

It also seems like that more and more things will support multiple languages, so maybe in five years we’ll be able to use Ruby in our Flash applications