i learned to program with python and flask and promptly started hammering out my project. flask was great for learning piece by piece what goes into a web app but eventually it grew to a point where i was relying on all these extensions that were no longer maintained and i was spending alot of time to configure and setup every last bit of functionality i needed and every extension was like a new DSL to learn.

The obvious move at the time was to move to django and I spent some time familiarizing myself with it's own DSL. But boy was i struggling all along the way to do things how I liked in Flask with django. The Django Templates were extremely limiting (no modules) and couldn't even do regular python things and I came to find that extensions for Django were in no better shape than flask's. There was no clear solution for rate limiting and various other things I was looking for.

I've followed rails from a distance for a long time but, coming from python, ruby seemed so abstract to me i could just never figure it out but towards the end of my django time, i was finding that rails did/had everything i wanted and it all worked just the way i wanted it to and it was calling to me really hard. i took a big leap and spent a couple months diving fully into ruby, doing all the tutorials, reading all the books. at this point i am officially converted and my project app with it is already further along than i ever got with flask or django. when they say "ruby/rails is built for programmer happiness", they really mean it. and i can really feel/appreciate it. it's extremely fun to use and to see real progress without having to rack my brain and figure out some internals before i can proceed every so many hours. i'm just getting shit done and things work just how you'd intuitively think they should. rails ftw