Why Ruby on Rails won't become mainstream

In Cedric's opinion, RoR is a great, near-mystical development tool. But its magic is precisely, in his opinion, why it can't achieve widespread adoption:

Ruby on Rails is just too advanced. I'm serious. It has an incredible amount of slick features involving a lot of magic (both Ruby-related and invented by David himself). For talented developers, these features are a dream come true... autowiring of the MVC, scaffolding, defaults over configuration, unit tests (even integration tests now, nice!), you name it. David hit every single pain point that Web developers (regular developers even) have been facing these past years. Ruby on Rails in itself is a great example of how to nicely package what we have learned about software development these past five years. But it's still a very wide gap for corporate developers to cross. Sometimes, too much magic is too much magic, and it can definitely be the case that the flow of code is too direct or too clever to be understandable by regular developers.

Otaku, Cedric's Weblog: Why Ruby on Rails won't become mainstream