>> Rails is very hard for the beginner to learn, much harder than before.

I think that Rails is hard to learn for several reasons:

* unless you've used it before, you have to learn Ruby too

* Rails is fast moving and has a lot of pieces

* the error messages can be cryptic and hard to decipher

I've been developing with Ruby and Rails for several years now and I still encounter cryptic error messages.

As a newbie I found it incredibly frustrating when Google did not bring up an immediate answer, it basically built a brick wall around me. I don't think this is Rails' fault per se, it's just the nature of the beast.

I found the Hartl RoR tutorial slow going, and couldn't parse whether my confusion was Rails, or Ruby, or REST concepts (& Rails implementation thereof), or TDD (which I found takes some getting used to). "Learning Rails" seems to involve learning some design practices and process tools that are less mandatory when learning other frameworks. But I'm just a newbie with some Python / Django familiarity, others may take to this stuff faster.

I have found those additions worthwhile. The work I've done in Django has gone a _lot_ faster, and I think better written, for the orientation to REST and TDD.

Perhaps real devs with more experience find these pieces less helpful and more intrusive?

If you recall back in the Rails 1.x days, it wasn't exactly pleasant to learn -- if only because of the awful documentation.

Point being, Rails' first priority is to improve developers' productivity, sanity and happiness - all developers using it, not just new ones.

Even before 1.x, Rails has been pretty easy to figure out, and looking at the old documentation, apparently well-documented. There were countless tutorial-style blog posts if the API docs weren't enough. The Ruby mailing list was inundated for a long time with talk about Rails, to the point that I had to make a filter.

I'm not by any means a Rails fan, and think that even now, it feels like a PHP framework. (I have a "competing" web framework that I wrote and use whenever I have the flexibility, if you can call it a competitor; it's not actively promoted and the users number in the low single digits). But they do deserve credit for making sure that it's easy to figure out how to get things done.

"Rails is very hard for the beginner to learn"

compared to what? Have you tried to learn Spring MVC? No way rails is harder to learn than that. Are you comparing it to no-framework php files?

Forgive me, but I fail to see how the main point of the original article is even valid.

Or even EJB2 & JSF on WebSphere :)

Rails has always had a severe learning curve. I don't think it's gotten harder, it's just shifted in what you have to learn. I think that if anything, the inclusion of things like Bundler has made it easier (seriously, conflict resolution in Rails 1.x apps? Ew.)

Having started with Rails 3, I'd have to say that's not really true.

Programming is really not supposed to be super easy. When someone is able to start "programming websites" in a couple hours using Rails things get dirty, ala 2007-08 when Rails started getting a bad reputation for amateurish/slow/buggy applications.