Ask HN: Is Ruby on Rails really worth knowing?

I had my doubts about Ruby too, but we built the entire backend of our iPhone app (http://loqly.me) on ROR and our website is going to be entirely on ROR too. The amount of time it saves you as compared to any other language is nothing short of mind blowing. Of course I am just sharing my 2 cents since you asked. Others could have a different experience. But we started out with php and 2 months down the line changed over to ROR and boy were we glad we switched!

Python actually is strongly typed: Everything does have a type, and aside from within numerics (integers upconvert to floats), Python generally won't automatically convert between them. Mixing objects of different types in operations that would otherwise be ambiguous hence throws an error: You can't use a string and a numeric as the operands of an addition without explicitly converting one of them first, for example.

However, variables in Python aren't names assigned to storage areas for data of a particular type, but store references to objects, and can be freely reassigned to objects of any type at any time, i.e. there's no type constraint on them. Similarly, Python's built-in collection working horses (lists, dictionaries, tuples, sets) store references to objects of any type as well, including allowing mixing of the types of referenced objects in a single collection.

So while on one hand it won't allow you to shoot yourself in the foot with type mixing to a degree that e.g. PHP does, it also won't allow you to place much in the way of specific type constraints on common constructs. Technically you can check an object's specific type explicitly, but that's a lot of manual work and frowned upon since it undermines polymorphism, i.e. having the same code work on as many different object types as possible as long as they implement the interfaces the code wants to use. Some people feel this makes large bodies of code harder to maintain than in a language that places specific type constraints on variables, collections and other constructs.

the most important skills you can have, imo, is the ability to learn new things as soon as possible, to be come competent quickly.

taking the time to learn rails isn't just about learning rails, it is also about keeping your ability to learn sharp.

It really depends what your looking to do. I use Rails and php depending on the project. I would say actually its best to focus on frameworks and Rails is probably one of the better ones out there these days. Django is also interesting. Php frameworks are going through alot of changes right now with no clear winner. So youll have to spend extra time even trying to figure out which one to use whereas with Rails its pretty much the dominant one so all the support in the community goes to it.

There are only a few ways you can pass data from one web page to another. Get and Post. Get sends it in the url whereas Post sends it in sort of a hidden way. In the old days post was preferred for more sensitive data so the user wouldnt see things in the url. Also post was and is used to keep the urls cleaner. However with the advent of web services the uses of these have changed somewhat.

Yes. But make sure you start with Rails 3 and Ruby 1.9. They are vastly improved over Rails 2 & Ruby 1.8 IMHO.