[erikpukinskis]

This is I think the biggest reason Rails has remained a pro development tool and has failed to usurp PHP in the beginner realm.

Rails took me about a year of full time work before I could reliably fix bugs in a 1-day timeframe. Before that there were frequent unpredictable week-long goose chases through the Rails stack... usually just to learn I was Doing It Wrong and there was some convention you just really can't break without everything falling apart.

I had the same experience with Ember.js, another convention-over-configuration framework. A year of full time development before I could bang stuff out without being afraid I'd get totally lost and have a feature balloon up from two days to a month. And this is with a computer science degree and 10 years of web development experience.

Once you get past that first year, it's great. Or, if you're on a team of people, you just get help.

I taught RailsBridge a few times, and it's kind of crazy how many concepts you have to teach someone just to get to the point of a simple web form on Rails. It's probably at least 100 totally disconnected ideas, from routers to HTML to templating engines to MVC.

We're just not doing a good job paving a path from PHP's functional, minimalist, "copy/paste this snippet of code into your template" architecture to things like Rails/Ember which provide ergonomic toolkits for modern apps.

[wh-uws]

You are so right and it breaks my heart every time I think about it.

I just don't know what could really bridge that gap. So many terrible php and <insert language you like to make fun of> codebases come from exactly

> "copy/paste this snippet of code into your template"

programming.

Which is how most beginners learn (myself included. cobbling together myspace and wordpress templates) and it takes a while before you've done enough of it to see how deep the holes you dig with it can be but in the mean time your stuff "works" but is a nightmare to maintain and understand long term.

I had a lot of hope for the node community (because at least then newbies only have to learn the quirks of one scripting language) solving this with express/ sails or something else but they've stalled.

I guess its just a hard problem. No idea how to solve it

[enraged_camel]

>>Which is how most beginners learn (myself included. cobbling together myspace and wordpress templates)

That right there is the problem: too many people are after quick wins and instant gratification and aren't willing to make an effort to learn something the proper way and appreciate its complexity, even if they are not exposed to it directly.

I learned Rails via the Rails Tutorial[1], and finished it in three weeks of evening and weekend sessions. When I started, I knew a little JavaScript, but not much else. By the end of the tutorial, I had a fully functioning app (parts of it I had customized, even!) and was ready to start building my own stuff. It was very empowering and I was blown away by how incredibly smooth and easy the Rails framework was.

That said, if I had taken the approach that lazy PHP beginners take and tried to learn by copy/pasting stuff (or relied on Rails scaffolds from the get-go), I would have stumbled over and over and probably given up.

[1]https://www.railstutorial.org/book

edit: not sure why people are downvoting -- did I say something controversial?

[spoiler]

>> Which is how most beginners learn (myself included. cobbling together myspace and wordpress templates) > That right there is the problem: too many people are after quick wins and instant gratification and aren't willing to make an effort to learn something the proper way and appreciate its complexity, even if they are not exposed to it directly.

While I kinda agree with you to a certain degree, I think instant gratification is crucially important, at least in the first "play" phase. A lot of people don't want to know something before they even attempt to play with it. That's what playing is there for, it gives you a small insight of what to expect.

You don't really have a play phase with Rails... or Ruby for that matter, a lot of my front-end or PHP developer friends can't even install Ruby on Windows because it requires you to know certain things about the OS, the language and some very basic things from how linking, compiling and C works (most developers don't).

To even get started with Rails you either need to be a experienced Ruby developer, or dedicate time to learning Rails before you even begin to use it (and even then, I am not sure you could grasp some concepts without knowing Ruby's rich syntax).

Not to mention, you need to know how to use bundler, setup a database, a web server, etc. Compared to most PHP frameworks, where it's just download X, visit /, "voila," edit file something.php, visit `/something` and "voila," again.

Also, as someone who works for a hosting company, most of our PHP developer clients don't RTFM, they prefer blog posts, or YouTube tutorials (this isn't even a joke) because they don't have time for getting started guides. :|

[stdbrouw]

I'm sure you just meant to highlight that reading tutorials is often a better experience than just messing around and hoping to get somewhere (which is why I didn't downvote you), but on first reading it comes across as "if you can't commit to devoting nights and weekends to systematically learn how to code, you're doing it wrong and you're probably a bit of an idiot – like all of those PHP script kiddies."

[zanny]

I think something like Flask is super easy to learn. Go one step further and use Bottle, its a single Python file and its API is one page long.

Its basic, but that should be the point. You can fluidly graduate from Bottle to Flask + extensions or to Django depending on which you prefer. Or just start in Flask - the base API is pretty much the same, its just it has a ton of extensions to implement all the server functionality you could want.

[hvidgaard]

It's an act of balance. You shouldn't have to spend days hunting down simple bugs or figure a convention out. It's not that Rails is bad, but all conventions should be well documented, and if all conventions and general usecases for them cannot fit in a single volume book, it needs to be trimmed down.

[ivanhoe]

You are comparing high-level frameworks like Rails or Ember with PHP, which is a language. Learning ruby is not that harder than learning php (actually it was easier IMHO). And if you compare Symfony or Laravel, and Rails, then again the difference in learning curve is not that big, it takes (quite a few) months to really learn your way around in any of them.

[mpd]

I mean... you don't start out using power tools, right?

Every tool can't be everything to everybody.

At the beginning of my career, there's no way I could do Rails, but nowadays, I'm just not interested in anything but.

[huuu]

I'm not sure what you mean with pro tool.

All those vague concepts kept me away from learning rails because it always felt it was hacked together.

There are also a lot of PHP frameworks that have this pro status because they are hard to learn. But using comments as programming features doesn't sound pro to me.

Some time ago I jumpt fresh into C# and .NET MVC. Now that is what I call a pro framework. It was very easy to learn but so powerfull.

Ofcourse I'm biased now because I fell a little in love with C#

[stuartaxelowen]

Good tools don't do this to you.