[asolove]

These theories all miss the basic point. Yes, Rails is not a good way for a beginner to learn proper professional programming. The proper way to do that is to write nice, fairly-mathematical code in Scheme or Python until you understand recursion, algorithms, etc.

But learning to become a professional programmer isn't most people's goal. Rails is the fastest way to go from "I want a webapp that..." to "I have a webapp that sorta..." and it is that ability to build useful, visible things very quickly (even if they have lots of bugs and problems) that gets people interested enough in programming to actually sit down and learn the hard parts.

[forkhammer]

I'm not talking about 'professional programming', really—I'm talking about being able to achieve a reasonable outcome in a reasonable amount of time.

I'm not even interested in people becoming good programmers. My point is that people who will spend the time to learn the hard parts will benefit more from learning from the lowest level that makes sense to them, rather than trying to learn Ruby and the CLI alongside Rails as they muddle through an app. We'll see better conversion rates if we encourage beginners to start from the beginning, and to spend even a modicum of time learning those technologies.

[jshen]

I think the truth is that most of those people aren't cut out to be programmers.

[apsurd]

A while back there was a post about how great http://teamtreehouse.com 's tutorials are. I added the following comment:

"But don't you think in an industry like software development, you need to be able to self-educate. Software just moves too fast. So a person that needs hand-holding is not going to 'get' what it takes to be a good programmer."

I got downvoted for it =)

So I think people are all over the map when it comes to how to learn and how to teach. But in the end, I maintain that you only get good by being self-motivated and driven - no other way.