I'd always remembered word-of-mouth from Rails enthusiasts touting how easy Rails was (talking 2006-2007). A Rails guru last summer told me that 'Rails was never promoted as being easy'. Was my memory faulty? Has the PR around Rails changed over the years?
If you're a beginner, as in, never made a web app in your life, Rails is going to be hard because it expects you to know so much.
But if you're a seasoned web developer who knows JS, HTML, CSS, and SQL, and has a grasp on OO programming, Rails is easy. To be honest, the CS students that intern for me are working on the production apps within a couple of weeks.
I couldn't say, I'm not familiar with the PR around Rails. But I will point out that Rails being easy is different than Rails being for beginners.
Rails is easy in that it solves a lot of pain points that exist around web development. If you are an absolute beginner then you won't yet have any conceptualization of the pain points and Rails will just seem needlessly complex.
Every time I use something that isn't rails, I am reminded by how easy it makes things. You get
- validations
- basic architecture
- emails
- dependancy management
- asset packaging and management
- concept of "dev" vs "production" mode
- data access
- logging
- test framework
- easy way to provide an api
- access to loads of other things (like authentication/ auto CRUD / client side testing / etc)
and all of that usually is just a line or two of code to activate, and will get wired up with everything else. On top of that it is actually done well, and if you dont like any of those bits, they are easy to swap out (for example, I don't use the built in test framework, templating, or data access framework pretty much every, but it is STILL easy to get going quickly).
I understand that was a bit fanboi-ish, but if I were going to rave about rails, that is what I would say :)
It was promoted as being easy for people who already knew how to program. Which it was. The 5-minute blog video wouldn't help a total newb at all, but to an experienced developer it's clear how powerful it was.
