Ruby on Rails is not for the beginners
Thursday, 23. November 2006, 08:32:21
Finally, I've understood how is it hard to explain some features of RoR to those who are not experienced much with the webdev.
Looking at all these RJS Minus R, REST, automatic pluralization, hidden methods and all, I see that it is not trivial. It seems, that you can understand all that stuff and reasons behind it in only two cases: you're amazingly genious, or you've worked hard with PHP, Java or Perl before. If the latter, you understand the concept of RoR easily.
Thus, RoR's helloworld-like applications are too complicated to very beginners, because in such case a beginner must accept an idea of MVC, directory hierarchy and such even before getting actual "Hello world". When he/she wants a more complex examples, it gets more complicated (according to possibly fast and dirty alternative in PHP). In reality it's not complex, but for beginner it too much, since he/she doesn't have any idea of What's Going On behind These Methods. To understand all the background stuff a beginner have to learn much and accumulate an experience.
RoR doesn't provide easy and clear way to learn WebDev, as PHP does. I don't see a million-army of RoR developers (most of them, of course, are nubies) in the nearmost two years.
The only thing that may lead to such an army is a redesigned version of RoR, maybe light library to Ruby with ERb or something, which allows you to access .rhtml directly through the browser. It will look exactly like PHP, so why do we need it then?
And you know what? I think it pretty cool that RoR is a cute professional framework and most of its users are smart, opinionated and experienced. I feel myself in a good place then.
Looking at all these RJS Minus R, REST, automatic pluralization, hidden methods and all, I see that it is not trivial. It seems, that you can understand all that stuff and reasons behind it in only two cases: you're amazingly genious, or you've worked hard with PHP, Java or Perl before. If the latter, you understand the concept of RoR easily.
Thus, RoR's helloworld-like applications are too complicated to very beginners, because in such case a beginner must accept an idea of MVC, directory hierarchy and such even before getting actual "Hello world". When he/she wants a more complex examples, it gets more complicated (according to possibly fast and dirty alternative in PHP). In reality it's not complex, but for beginner it too much, since he/she doesn't have any idea of What's Going On behind These Methods. To understand all the background stuff a beginner have to learn much and accumulate an experience.
RoR doesn't provide easy and clear way to learn WebDev, as PHP does. I don't see a million-army of RoR developers (most of them, of course, are nubies) in the nearmost two years.
The only thing that may lead to such an army is a redesigned version of RoR, maybe light library to Ruby with ERb or something, which allows you to access .rhtml directly through the browser. It will look exactly like PHP, so why do we need it then?
And you know what? I think it pretty cool that RoR is a cute professional framework and most of its users are smart, opinionated and experienced. I feel myself in a good place then.
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