I'd had some experience with Perl and quite a bit of experience (had built a couple large-ish apps) in PHP.
The reason I referenced Rails and Django as motivators in finding those languages is because after having built and then forced to maintain an enterprise-class application in PHP, I REALLY liked the notion of an MVC framework, and things like Cake and Symfony weren't out (or at least I didn't know about them) yet.
So, yeah, I wasn't a programming newbie altogether, but I wasn't as comfortable in just picking up new languages either.
The reason I referenced Rails and Django as motivators in finding those languages is because after having built and then forced to maintain an enterprise-class application in PHP, I REALLY liked the notion of an MVC framework, and things like Cake and Symfony weren't out (or at least I didn't know about them) yet.
So, yeah, I wasn't a programming newbie altogether, but I wasn't as comfortable in just picking up new languages either.