I still sort of stand by those statements, but again that was based on a beginners completely incorrect view of the world. However, to add a bit more color to those statements which maybe you can infer how I think about programming? I meant something like:
Rails/Ruby was very popular bit it was a framework. You could do a massive amount with very little work. You could build an entire app without any knowledge of what Rails did for you under the hood. NodeJS was a developing technology of which I could gain massive leverage, both learning why asynchronous processes work(I still have trouble with these)/general programming concepts as well as double down on a front end language. The v8 compiler and ryan dahl seemed to provide a good avenue for which to learn lower level(at least than rails) about programming and it seemed to embody the unix philosophy. This seemed like a good place to be and I could grow within a community that was going to be influential. HTML, CSS and SCSS were pretty easy to learn, so by learning a single database technology and javascript I could be a full-stack developer. Not in the sense of how I would market myself, but that I could go out and build a full application if I wanted to and that was poweful and awesome from a learning experience. Given the proliferation of nosql The database, front-end, orm, and back-end were entirely javascript so I didn't pay a high context switching penalty.
wordpress: I dislike wordpress. I don't think it would make any sense to tell someone interested in programming front or back end software to learn "wordpress". Wordpress is a great convenience for setting up a blog, but I presume they have a CMS as well. I don't know much about it, only doing the most basic PHP stuff, but PHP & Wordpress seem to be synonymous with client facing software that requires a CMS/non-technical user to make updates.
python. I mean, python at least from my understanding is a great language for processing data. It is why tensorflow ships as a python library and numpy is used for a lot of data work. The communities using R and python work with data at scale and thus those communities have developed a lot of tooling to accomplish this, not that this stuff needs to be done in python, but machine learning, textual parsing and classification libraries and some NLP stuff all seem to hit python first. However, oython does have a great community writing secure applications. Django and Flask, sqlalchemy ORM as well as zeroDB exist and there are communities using python for apps, data parsing, and microservice deployments.
However, I define prgramming (like most people) as a schedule of television or radio broadcasts.