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A comment on The Odin Project – Learn Web Development for Free. Parent comment

Re:The Odin Project – Learn Web Development for Free by YorickPeterse on Monday July 24, 2017 @04:44PM (#14842508) 

    I question starting people on Ruby for web development.
Heavens forbid using a popular, practical language combined with a mature and even more popular web framework.

    Anyone starting web development now would do well to stick with Javascript.
Yes, let's recommend people to use a language where the things they learn (to use) stop being maintained/used/relevant 1 month later.

    And you can always use that on the backend if you have to
You can use Ruby in the frontend as well: http://opalrb.org/

    and if you need to spend time learning something for the backend part you'd be better 
    served learning about relational databases than Ruby.
What? Learning Ruby doesn't somehow mean you can't learn about relational databases.

When learning/teaching something you very much want to pick something that:

1. Has been around for at least 5 years

2. Is actively used, maintained, and overall has proven itself

3. Has good documentation and tooling

4. Perhaps has programs to help people getting started (Rails Girls, PyLadies, etc)

5. Is still around 5 years from now

Ruby and Rails are a perfect choice for this, though Rails (just like most frameworks out there) _is_ a bit complex for total beginners.

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Re:The Odin Project – Learn Web Development for Free by vosper on Monday July 24, 2017 @07:29PM (#14843687)
I was trying to suggest that it's already a lot to learn Javascript, CSS and HTML for absolute beginners. I don't think adding Rails to the mix does anything except make things more complicated. In another comment, I added that I wouldn't use Django, either, and suggested that Meteor or Firebase are probably a better place to start brand-new developers. The fewer new things you're throwing at them in one go, the better.

And if you look at the recently published (and fairly well received) IEEE language rankings, you'll see that Ruby is ranked 9th for the number of jobs, and has Java, C#, Python, and PHP ahead of it - all languages with one or more major web frameworks. Any of them would be a better choice for someone looking for work, according to these charts.

Also, let's be honest - in the scheme of things, no-one uses Ruby on the front-end.

[0] http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/interactive-the-top-programm...

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