I have complained in the thread about that kickstarter project already and I'll repeat myself from a slightly different angle here. I say: Installation is not the problem. It's just a pre-taste of what you're getting into and if the standard procedure is so broken that it needs artificial padding then we have a much bigger problem here.
That bigger and real problem with Rails is wrong abstractions and too much magic, the stuff that you hit right after installation. In terms of discoverability Rails is the poorest of all popular web-frameworks.
I'll say Rails has many things right, but just as many deeply wrong. Which is an amplified problem for absolute beginners - for them it's double hard to unlearn bad patterns after struggling to grasp them in first place.
To name just a few:
It is not right that the default modus-operandi for pretty much everything (e.g. devise) is to inject a bunch of invisible, undiscoverable magic at installation time and leave the user at best with a few hardly discoverable hints about how it actually works (and where to look when it doesn't).
It is not right that rails still makes heavy use of code-generators (related to the previous bullet).
It is not right to still have no automation for schema migration. I do in fact claim the ActiveRecord pattern has proven a poor choice for the Rails use-case.
etc.
For teaching I would claim Rails is about the worst possible choice. It's an opaque blob of magic that provides good leverage when massaged in just the right way. But that "right" way is in large parts so undiscoverable and detached from reality that you end up with juniors who may be able to churn out simple rails views - yet are immediately lost when anything diverts from their learned script.
So, back on topic. In my experience teaching web-stuff works best bottom up. Start with HTML/CSS, then give them something like sinatra so they get a grasp on what a request is. Even PHP is a valid choice here.
Rails is for much later, for when they at least have a remote clue what they're doing.
That bigger and real problem with Rails is wrong abstractions and too much magic, the stuff that you hit right after installation. In terms of discoverability Rails is the poorest of all popular web-frameworks.
I'll say Rails has many things right, but just as many deeply wrong. Which is an amplified problem for absolute beginners - for them it's double hard to unlearn bad patterns after struggling to grasp them in first place.
To name just a few:
It is not right that the default modus-operandi for pretty much everything (e.g. devise) is to inject a bunch of invisible, undiscoverable magic at installation time and leave the user at best with a few hardly discoverable hints about how it actually works (and where to look when it doesn't).
It is not right that rails still makes heavy use of code-generators (related to the previous bullet).
It is not right to still have no automation for schema migration. I do in fact claim the ActiveRecord pattern has proven a poor choice for the Rails use-case.
etc.
For teaching I would claim Rails is about the worst possible choice. It's an opaque blob of magic that provides good leverage when massaged in just the right way. But that "right" way is in large parts so undiscoverable and detached from reality that you end up with juniors who may be able to churn out simple rails views - yet are immediately lost when anything diverts from their learned script.
So, back on topic. In my experience teaching web-stuff works best bottom up. Start with HTML/CSS, then give them something like sinatra so they get a grasp on what a request is. Even PHP is a valid choice here.
Rails is for much later, for when they at least have a remote clue what they're doing.