Should ASP.NET MVC developers really learn Ruby on Rails?

Question

Hey guys,
Today, I came a cross a blog post for David Hayden explaining why he thinks ASP.NET MVC developers should learn Ruby on Rails.
Some of the reasons David mentioned:

• ASP.NET MVC was inspired by Rails and in order for me to be a smarter ASP.NET MVC Developer I feel like I need to know Rails.
• IronRuby is well on its way to being released which has got me excited about learning a new language, Ruby.
• I really, really like Cucumber and RSpec and would love to use them for BDD via IronRuby on my ASP.NET MVC C# Projects.
• I think it would be cool to develop ASP.NET MVC Web Application using Ruby via IronRuby.

What do you think guys? Is it really important for ASP.NET MVC developers to learn Ruby on Rails? If we are evaluating this option on a scale of 5 degrees ( Urgent-Important, Urgent-Not Important, Not Urgent-Important, Not Urgent-Not Important, A Total Waste of Time), what would your choice be guys, hopefully you will mention some benefits resulting from your experience working with both. Some articles, blog-posts on that subject are totally appreciated.
PS: There's a real use-case for this stuff, as my team leader is offering some courses on the house, and I was really considering Ruby on Rails.

Answer 1

I would disagree that ASP.NET was inspired by RoR.

Not Urgent-Not Important

That said I have used RoR and its great, but it will not help you become a better ASP.NET MVC programmer any more than learning other technology or tools.

It is always good to learn something new to broaden your abilities.

So my answer is yes learn Ruby on rails because you will be a better programmer for it, just not a better ASP.NET MVC programmer :)

Answer 2

not urgent, not important. It's never going to be a bad idea to learn RoR as it will give you a different perspective, but I think it's more important to get a deep knowledge of ASP.NET MVC and understand the full implications of using the MVC framework on top of the ASP.NET stack. Things like session and cache management as well as routing and controller actions work differently in ASP.NET MVC to RoR not to mention you're using MVC within a statically typed environment rather than the dynamic language of ruby so I think your focus should be on going deeper with ASP.NET MVC that trying to glean what you can from RoR just for the sake of it.

Answer 3

I would say it "Not Urgent-Important". Many features are of ASP.NET MVC is inspired by ROR. Apart from this, learning Ruby itself will be a great learning experience. It has many language features which you will find in .NET 4.0. So, it helps you to stay on curve with respect to where programming languages are heading.

Besides there are many cool things Rails provides. Understanding it opens up doors of opportunity when you work with asp.net mvc.

Apart from this ruby language already has RSpec for BDD. Learning this will broaden your understanding about BDD and will be helpful when you plan doing BDD with asp.net mvc.

Overall you will learn many good programming practices as well. So, the journey would be interesting.. Give it a shot, hope you won't regret it, as there is nothing to lose.