My good friend Clarke Ching asks an interesting question: Could most programmers become better programmers (considerably more productive) by working with Ruby on Rails for a while?
I’m not a huge fan of Rails, and I’ll post more of an answer here later, when I have a little time. In the meantime, what do you think? Can Rails teach everyone to be better?
silk and spinach 
I would say definitely ‘yes’. I found myself writing some OO perl recently and the experience with Rails (and Ruby, as well) really made it a lot clearer how to structure sensibly. I found myself writing methods that were akin to those found in Rails – methods were basically wrappers for more umbrella versions, for example, and also using attr_accessor-esque functionality elsewhere instead of hashes.
This means my code was way better than it would before I started with Rails, and is much easier to refactor.
I haven’t written a lot of Ruby outside of Rails; but certainly it is a great way to get into the language.