I like reading Ted, but I think he makes a common mistake here - it's one you see a lot of people make in the software development business, while discussing Cedric Beust's take on Ruby and the mainstream:

Cedric's definition of mainstream includes being appealing to Visual Basic and PHP programmers. That seems to be the backdrop of his first two points, that Ruby and Rails are too hard for these folks. I can see some of these points - folks in our reading group have been somewhat mind bent by some of the Ruby concepts, and they are Java/C# folks, which would put them higher on the food chain than VB and PHP programmers. I think that some of this is just unfamiliarity as opposed to difficulty, but there's not doubt that there is a learning curve there.

I find that a little funny, because of the conversation I had with Joshua Bloch a couple of years ago after his API talk at OT 2004. When I asked him about various Java things I dislike ("final" being the main one), he asserted that Java developers are down near the bottom of the developer food chain, and needed crutches like that - Smalltalkers and Lispers were up near the top, so they didn't.

The only thing that differs about these thoughts is where various programming cliques belong in the food chain. Just about everyone thinks that VB developers are some kind of lower life form, but they differ about where other people "belong" in the list. The thing is, I've dealt with a number of VB developers, and I don't accept the idea that they are lower ranking. They found a tool that works for them, and solves the kind of development problems they face. Heck, for lots of common tasks, VB has been a great tool - it can solve a number of problems faster and easier than Java, Smalltalk, or Ruby. Giorgio Ferraris recognized this awhile back, and has been building tools to make Smalltalk a player at that end.

One of the larger blind spots in this industry is silver bullet-ism. We Smalltalkers are as guilty of it as anyone else. Java developers think Java is the end all, be all. So do Smalltalkers. So do Lisp developers, and the Ruby buzz is filling the Ruby-ists with the same triumphalism. In an important sense, many VB developers may actually be more sane about this - most of the VB developers I've met don't think VB is the uber-answer.