There is a real shortage of talented programmers out there. Most programmers are completely awful and write disgusting lumps of buggy spaghetti code, regardless of their age. Nobody in the market for a talented programmer -- nobody worth working for, anyway -- is going to turn a talented programmer away because they have a receding hairline.

Yes, there is mild ageism. It's not because people in the industry have some sort of innate hatred of people over 35; it's because older programmers tend to lack the geeky dedication and up-to-date skillsets of younger programmers, and tend to have higher pay requirements because of their families, mortgages, etc.

Tend. Tend.

Show yourself to be otherwise and you'll be on an even footing with the younger coders. And if you do carry those drawbacks, well, it's not really your age that's holding you back.

(Of course, there are enormous numbers of older programmers who defy that tendency and are superior programmers because of their experience, and enormous numbers of younger programmers who are absolutely total crap)

For whatever it's worth, I'll be 33 in a few months and the most talented programmer currently in my personal/professional circle is over 40.

Congratulations. You got the joke.

How is that any worse than traditional web development environments, where it's equally easy to a "select * from orders" ? It's so easy to forget a WHERE clause.

If anything, I think the presence of "all" in "Orders.all.each { |order| ... code goes here ... }" is much easier to spot than a missing SQL clause.

Not that that excuses any of Rails' other flaws that you pointed out.