Comment by Pamar

90% of my my experience has always been dealing with large-ish corporate systems. I am in Europe, so YMMV even when talking about corporate instead of smaller scale projects.

In my experience stuff like RAILS had negligible impact in my field because companies would always require solid backup from some big name vendor (MS, Oracle, IBM, Sun - back in the day, or even SAP).

So most if not all the smaller silver bullets did not even make a blimp on the radar... and stuff like Java or .NET, while definitely better than C or COBOL... did not really deliver in terms of productivity boost (in part because, as noted in the message I am answering to, expectations kept growing at the same pace)