[jeremymcanally]

It's easy to paint everyone's experience with your own isn't it?

I answer questions from people new to Ruby a lot (given that I wrote one of the few and the earliest introductory books for Ruby that's free) and they are VERY often the exact questions he mentions here. Maybe people are too lazy to find the answers. Maybe they're utterly immobilized by a new tech stack that has a lot of choices. Maybe they just aren't as smart as you are. Whatever it is, we really need to find a simple way to address these questions. I think a lot of them are already addresses through blog posts, and as you mentioned, through the tutorial you're following, but a lot of them aren't (and sometimes they're answered incorrectly due to the age of the content or simple ignorance on the author's part).

Let's not pretend these people don't exist just because you aren't one of them. Many people do have to deal with this stuff up front due to the nature of the work they plan to do with it, and if the information isn't accessible, they'll just move on to somewhere it is.

[geebee]

"Let's not pretend these people don't exist just because you aren't one of them."

I assure you that I am one of them. I'm probably one of the people whose questions you helped answer on a discussion forum.

The part where I am, as you said, painting everyone's experience with my own is comparing Rails to a Java based web programming stack. Someone coming from PHP, for instance, might find it kind of difficult to use a framework that (essentially) can't be used without some knowledge of OOP, MVC, and so forth (as opposed to just putting some things up on a page). Sure, there's a learning curve.

But the "immobilization" you mentioned happens in degrees. Yes, it always takes some work to get up in running, because programming isn't easy. However, I don't think that the range of choices immobilizes a new programmer in Rails to anywhere near the degree that it does in the Java world.

So while I would agree that I have a particular angle that isn't necessarily shared by everyone struggling with rails, I don't think that my experiences are unusual for a programmer with experience in Java who has gone through the learning curve on web app development in Java and Rails.

[jshen]

"Whatever it is, we really need to find a simple way to address these questions ... they'll just move on to somewhere it is."

Really? Java is worse in this regard! C# even worse since you have to use mono if you aren't on windows and mono isn't 100% up to date with C# from MS. Python is very similar to ruby on this front, lot's of choices. PHP is well PHP.

I still think ruby in the best in this regard. install 1.8.7, gem install rails, but the agile rails book, start coding. A lot of the stuff in this article is just noise that no one needs to think about. In fact, there is a giant 'getting started' link on the rails site which answers this question pretty well.

http://rubyonrails.org/download

I'd still like an example of where else some one would go to find a greener pasture.

[gisikw]

A lot of it is noise, absolutely. But while I wrote this as satire, it's based on the experiences I've seen from new developers. If you didn't know any better, it could be easy to think that Rails devs all use Rails 3, are completely swept up in the NoSQL movement, and don't have libraries that will run on Ruby 1.8

Really this article was designed to point out that an overabundance of choice - even though they're great choices - can be harmful to new developers. And people should consider joining things like RailsMentors.org right now. Because more than ever, this is a time where one-on-one mentoring is all but necessary.

As far as greener pastures...I'd hate to see the day when any community measures itself by comparison to other communities, rather than on its own accomplishments.

[jshen]

"'d hate to see the day when any community measures itself by comparison to other communities"

most value judgements can only be made relative to other like things.