>Padrino’s best bet is to appeal to a younger, fresher group of programmers who haven’t spent years learning Rails
Anecdotal contradiction incoming. I started with Rails years and years ago (can't even remember when). I moved to Merb when Merb was the new hotness because I preferred it's modular approach. After Merb was "merged" (i.e. a few of its philosophies were put into Rails and Merb died due to lack of development), I caught on to Padrino and was impressed by it for the same reasons I was impressed by Merb. I program in Rails for a living but use Padrino for my personal projects.
I actually think a potential knock against Padrino is that it's not quite as easy to get into as Rails. When I got into Rails, it was all "create a blog in five minutes" which is what attracted me to it. There was a point where I didn't even understand the distinction between Ruby/Rails -- it was just one big scripting language to my PHP-addled mind. I think Padrino (or even just plain Sinatra) has a slightly steeper learning curve; but it's hard for me to comment on that necessarily because I am no longer a beginner and my perspective is a lot different.
Anecdotal contradiction incoming. I started with Rails years and years ago (can't even remember when). I moved to Merb when Merb was the new hotness because I preferred it's modular approach. After Merb was "merged" (i.e. a few of its philosophies were put into Rails and Merb died due to lack of development), I caught on to Padrino and was impressed by it for the same reasons I was impressed by Merb. I program in Rails for a living but use Padrino for my personal projects.
I actually think a potential knock against Padrino is that it's not quite as easy to get into as Rails. When I got into Rails, it was all "create a blog in five minutes" which is what attracted me to it. There was a point where I didn't even understand the distinction between Ruby/Rails -- it was just one big scripting language to my PHP-addled mind. I think Padrino (or even just plain Sinatra) has a slightly steeper learning curve; but it's hard for me to comment on that necessarily because I am no longer a beginner and my perspective is a lot different.