Should I Learn Drupal or Ruby on Rails?

Should I learn Drupal or Ruby on Rails? I heard Ruby on Rails was the hot programming language to learn.

Base your career on chasing the latest hot fad, and your career will go off the rails.

Why does Ruby on Rails have a reputation for being popular?

It is popular in Silicon Valley, so a lot of hot new web startups are built on Ruby on Rails.

Demand is a good reason to learn Ruby on Rails.

Groupon, Basecamp and Twitter were built on Ruby on Rails

That's a pretty good track record.

They've all abandoned it too, except for Basecamp, Ruby on Rails yields high programmer productivity but not sites that can handle a lot of simultaneous users and multi-threading.

Backupify switched from PHP to Ruby on Rails.

Everyone has heard of Groupon, even if they gave up on it after the fifth singles massage half off deal or restaurant coupon to a place you've never heard of. Who has heard of Backupify except on a list of startup names conceived out of desperation?

You think Rails won't scale.

Twitter came to that conclusion.

Why do you think Drupal is better?

Drupal is a content management system. For that application, it is far better than Ruby on Rails.

Refinery is built on Ruby.

That's it, throw around the famous names.

Part of the decision needs to be what you intend to do. If you want to set up a website or manage a knowledge base or create an online news website, Drupal wins.

What if I want to create an online marketplace or the latest killer app?

Then Ruby on Rails is the better choice of the two.

Unless I want to invent the next WordPress, I guess.