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Rails Is Not For Beginners

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Re: Rails Is Not For Beginners

#51

Post by josegonzalez »

adriand wrote: post #42
swq wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with cakephp is that every book written on this subject surpasses the quality of the framework itself. cakephp is easy to learn, but for me it's unusable in the long run. Easy stuff get's even easier, hard stuff get's harder. That's exactly what David meant. If you trade everything for learnability, it's not usable.

That sums up my experience with cakePHP too. I don't know what's happened with this framework in the last couple of years, but when I was first learning Rails and enjoying it, I used cakePHP for a big project because I knew PHP well, and didn't yet feel comfortable with committing to using Rails for it. That was a decision I regretted many times. The hoops I had to jump through to deal with complex database queries w…

Yes, CakePHP's "ORM" isn't a real ORM - it was built when Objects were awesomely broken in PHP4 - but I've actually found it much more usable than the current state of Ruby's ActiveRecord/Datamapper. Manipulating arrays to get just the SQL you want is sometimes annoying, but for the queries that you honestly can't get out of the ORM in CakePHP, it's also likely you wouldn't be able to do the same in any other ORM.

You'll also have to note that both frameworks have progressed significantly in the last few years - CakePHP actually just released a new major version, as did Rails a few months ago - so your experience a few years ago - was this in the 1.1 era - would just be indicative of the framework's beginnings, not where it currently is.

Feel free to message me with your thoughts if they still conflict; I'd love to hear the other side of the story since improving CakePHP as a framework helps not just my ego, but other developers who are using CakePHP to make a living :)

Re: Rails Is Not For Beginners

#53

Post by spacemanaki »

choxi wrote: post #24

That's why we chose to start with Sinatra with our interactive courses on http://www.trybloc.com . It's an easier transition to learn Sinatra which is conceptually much simpler.

FYI There's a bug in the REPL on your Ruby basics course: if you enter more than a handful of lines the cursor runs down the page while the actual input is at the bottom of the JQuery console...

Re: Rails Is Not For Beginners

#54

Post by hmans »

By the way, "beginners" wanting to get started building Ruby-based web applications should have a look at Serve (get-serve.com). It's not a framework per se, but if you're coming from PHP, it will probably get you started with the Ruby ecosystem pretty fast (and well), since it allows you to just create an .erb file and add inline code.

(Which is what most PHP people seem to want initially - you know, before that magic thing happens where they realize that real applications need structure.)

Re: Rails Is Not For Beginners

#56

Post by sofuture »

fingerprinter wrote: post #21

I usually say this about the types of webframeworks they are: Rails - > great for intermediate people who see benefits it brings. Great for pretty straight forward projects for beginners that can follow a book. Sinatra -> Great for beginners to "just get something working". Not great if someone needs everything decided for them. Awesome for advanced people. Awesome for non-standard projects. Padrino (Why don't we hea…

Wow, doing some initial evaluation of moving (some) of my .Net shop to some Sinatra. Why didn't I know about Padrino?

Re: Rails Is Not For Beginners

#57

Post by minikomi »

fingerprinter wrote: post #21

I usually say this about the types of webframeworks they are: Rails - > great for intermediate people who see benefits it brings. Great for pretty straight forward projects for beginners that can follow a book. Sinatra -> Great for beginners to "just get something working". Not great if someone needs everything decided for them. Awesome for advanced people. Awesome for non-standard projects. Padrino (Why don't we hea…

100% agreed on padrino. Perhaps when it hits 2.0 there will be a significant push from the (small but very active) team

Re: Rails Is Not For Beginners

#58

Post by krsgoss »

I've enjoyed using Rails for a long time now and still do. That being said, I've started steering towards Sinatra more given the minimal startup time and speed. The biggest gripe I have with Rails is the long startup time. It's a real drag on test driven development. Waiting close to 30 seconds per test run while the framework boots really sucks.

Re: Rails Is Not For Beginners

#59

Post by envex »

pankajdoharey wrote: post #41
dhh wrote: post #27

If you optimize a framework for beginners, you're optimizing for learnability. That's great for the first few days or even weeks of learning. But once you're past that, it's not so great. What you care more about is the usability of the thing once you know it. There are plenty of cases where learnability and usability are in conflict. Letting learnability win is a short-term relief. If you on the other hand optimize…

I personally went from PHP > RUBY > Ruby(cgi) > Sinatra > Rails, And i think the journey was great because sometimes we need to learn and work in really bad technologies to appreciate something as good as rails. We should strive to make the learning curve more enjoyable rather than making it beginner friendly, The only way i know of doing that is to show evolution of technologies, there merits and de-merits and why o…

To be fair, you went from PHP > Ruby.

You can't really call a framework a language.

Re: Rails Is Not For Beginners

#60

Post by jamesgeck0 »

fleitz wrote: post #6

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 inv…

> Beginners don't read the code to find out what something does, they read the docs and the tutorials.

Until the docs and tutorials fall short, or something unexpected happens, or they want to see why something behaves the way it does.

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