Rails Is Not For Beginners

Weirdly, this post has a Shyamalanic twist where it ends up being an exhortation to use Sinatra.

I use both rails and sinatra.

Sinatra is great for small things and beginners.

However, if you're going to spend all day writing web-app code, learning rails pays off HUGELY. It's the full package for modern web-app development, with massive productivity bonuses at the expense of a higher upfront.

The size of the code base has nothing to do with whether something is for beginners. Beginners don't read the code to find out what something does, they read the docs and the tutorials. It's mostly about tutorials to get them started, and quick iteration so they can see the fruits of their progress, combined with being a solution to a problem they have.

Excel is a great example of something that can get beginners involved in computing. Huge code base, but lots of tutorials, and solves problems people have.

If people's problems were along the lines of needing a website that can say "hello world" then Sinatra would be perfect, if their needs are more along the lines of CRUD app with web and iphone front ends then rails will likely serve them better.

I've been dealing recently with a guy who asked me for some tutorials on XCode, although he absolutely cannot code with Storyboards and Interface Builder he's fully mocked out apps that he wants developed. It's that kind of thing that gets people coding.

I'm actually starting to think there's something to be said for letting each generation of programmers grow up simultaneously with a hot new framework. It encourages learning through experimentation, lets them make the mistakes we all have to make, helps spread new ideas unbounded by the received wisdom (many of which will be stupid, some will have important influence for decades to come).

In the end, you get a bunch of developers that are both comfortable with a modern framework, have some understanding of the growing pains of new, complicated systems, and are ready to bring fresh ideas to more mature parts of the industry.

The contrasting mentality of sticking to what we already know is "good enough" leaves developers dull and uninspired, less equipped to think outside the "rules" inherited from previous generations that came from solving problems that look a lot different when you examine them 10 years later.

All of which is to say, Rails probably isn't for beginners anymore, and it shouldn't be, but I don't think trying to substitute a simple framework that explicitly avoids becoming complicated is necessarily what the doctor ordered...

Yeah, Rails gives beginners a big advantage by generating a huge scaffolding. It clears up a lot of ambiguities about where things go, and as a beginner it lets you explore different things that you can do in Rails.