Ask HN: Why do coding bootcamps teach Ruby on Rails and JavaScript?

In the late 2000s, the popularity of Ruby exploded when Rails gained mindshare. Rails, along with its healthy share of innovations [1] and productivity gains [2], was a good fit for code camps because it took little effort to crank out a basic CRUD app. Such fast feedback is very impactful on people who are just starting out programming.

Despite other frameworks borrowing from RoR in the years to come, Ruby's culture is largely compatible with the notion of 'programmer awesomeness' -- where a motivated coder is given a powerful toolset and is allowed to do great things, even if they're a bit quirky -- and is lighter on idiomatic dogma than some other languages that are popular for greenfield development today. While those idioms and mores are an asset to the languages that have them, they may stifle independent exploration and make people more afraid to make mistakes, which are quite detrimental to new learners.

Meanwhile, since the late 2000s, Javascript has become practically mandatory, largely buoyed by the HTML5/Web Platform effort and browsers finally getting their act together, but also by Node opening up an entirely new frontier for JS in a very desirable application domain. This, coupled with the JS community's tolerance and encouragement for exploration and independent re-discovery, also makes it a good fit.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12758085#12761705 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13196431#13197538

There might be more Python jobs, but a lot probably require knowledge that most people can't get in bootcamps.

A simple indeed search of Django vs Flask vs Rails shows there are much more demand for Ruby web developers, which is what bootcamps train for.

As someone who ended up learning Ruby (and Rails) for a previous job, I can attest that it's a great language from a learning/teaching perspective. Huge ecosystem, the syntax is actually readable, you don't have to fiddle with compilers, and so on. As mentioned in other comments, Rails is also the archetypal MVC framework, for better or worse; while I don't personally care for it, it gets the job done and is in relatively common use; in terms of getting students from zero to hireable quickly, Rails knowledge is pretty useful.

Meanwhile, Javascript is one of those necessities for web development, for better or worse, so a web-centric bootcamp will understandably put some emphasis on learning it.

- Ruby has less of a learning curve in contrast to a lot of other languages, though the margin is definitely narrowing with ECMAScript