The nice thing about boringness (so constrained) is that the capabilities of these things are well understood. But more importantly, their failure modes are well understood.

— Choose Boring Technology by Dan McKinley

I'm always keeping an eye on the future for the next "best thing" in programming, but to be honest I'm finding it hard to justify picking up a new language on the basis that it might take off. Rails is seen as old hat now but it's also tried and tested and perfectly suitable for building web applications and services. Yeah it's not on the edge anymore but then I know what to do when something goes wrong.