I think this attitude results in people only ever reaching local maxima in their development environments.
Adopting something like Haskell instead of Ruby isn't just an exercise for magpies who like new shiny things (In fact, Haskell is older than Ruby, and many concepts in functional programming are far older than most OO design patterns). It's embracing a different way to think about programming which can have fundamental improvements to the maintainability of the code you write, rather than just cursory ones.
No one is saying that a business problem can't be solved, or money can't be made, using Ruby.
Sure, rewriting a project from one language to another is very expensive and usually not worth it, but does that mean that we shouldn't explore other tools at all? At some point, a new project will begin, and it'll be valuable to have a more robust decision about which tools to use than just "Rails worked ok for us last time."
I'm not saying you can't ever move on, just do it with dignity.
That is to say, picking products mature enough for production use, and executing your migration without feeling the need to justify it to the world by shitting all over your old environment.
Age has little to do with it. FWIW, Haskell is trendy right now. Probably for good reason. My issue isn't with the direction, it's the method.
When you switch to something different, you see that a bunch of your problems and annoyances simply went away. You may not see yet the new problems and annoyances that you acquired. You're in the honeymoon phase.
With time, you will see the problems with the new language/tool/environment. Is it better than what you had before? Maybe, maybe not. But you are not in a position to accurately evaluate it while you're in the honeymoon phase.
Adopting something like Haskell instead of Ruby isn't just an exercise for magpies who like new shiny things (In fact, Haskell is older than Ruby, and many concepts in functional programming are far older than most OO design patterns). It's embracing a different way to think about programming which can have fundamental improvements to the maintainability of the code you write, rather than just cursory ones.
No one is saying that a business problem can't be solved, or money can't be made, using Ruby.
Sure, rewriting a project from one language to another is very expensive and usually not worth it, but does that mean that we shouldn't explore other tools at all? At some point, a new project will begin, and it'll be valuable to have a more robust decision about which tools to use than just "Rails worked ok for us last time."