The most recent web development project that I have been working on uses Ruby and Rails. I have seen some articles saying the Ruby is a good first language; however, I personally do not think so. I learned C++ as my first real language. I had used Matlab prior to learning C++, but not as extensively. In my opinion, Ruby does too much for the programmer. I think it is best to learn how programming works at a low level before going up in abstraction. Rails follows my train of thought on that too because it allows does a lot for the user automatically. Frameworks are supposed to hid the nitty gritty details, but in my opinion, there was just too much black magic going on with Rails. I can see how this is useful to someone who already knows the language and the framework to quickly finish a task that would otherwise take much longer. I am not saying that Ruby is a bad language or that Rails is a bad framework; however, I think that new programmers and developers should learn what is going on underneath the hood (C or even assembly) before driving a big fancy yacht(Ruby, Python, and many of the other popular languages). That is my two cents at least and I know that my opinion is an unpopular one.
Categories: dev | ruby