

Is Ruby on Rails still relevant? - companyhen

Hi,<p>I am considering joining Team Treehouse (http://teamtreehouse.com) and I saw they offer RoR tutorials. I was wondering if the language is still useful to learn in 2013? This may be a dumb question, but I have heard "bad" things about the language from people. I've been developing responsive WordPress themes over the past year and want to learn and try some new things. iOS Development is probably next on my list. I've been "learning" to code the past year on my own.
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nemrow
I attended the Launch conference in San Francisco this year and specifically
asked many of the startups demoing their software what they wrote in. The
majority of them were written in RoR. Also, if you are just starting out with
programming in general, once you get the hang of Ruby (which is the backbone
of RoR) rails will be the fastest way for you to get applications up and
running on the web. I would go ahead and say "Yes" to choosing RoR. Best of
luck!

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jennyjenjen
I think you're going to hear "bad" things about pretty much any language if
you investigate it far enough.

What do you mean you've been "learning" to code? (Your use of quotation marks
is curious.)

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companyhen
I mean, I have gone through Codecademy, Udacity, Lynda, etc. but I still
haven't written much of my own code besides some simple if/else scripts.

I usually just plug and play with prebuilt tools like Masonry.js and other
jQuery/PHP libraries I find useful. So I'm not sure if that counts as actual
programming.

I've always been a designer, and have come a long way on the programming side
from where I started. I still have a long way to go, and Treehouse seems like
it could be a great tool.

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otikik
Small correction: The language is called Ruby. "Ruby on Rails" is a framework
built on top of it. You can learn (and use) Ruby without Rails.

As for its relevancy, it's simply the best way to get jobs in my region
outside of Big Corp (where they want java or SAP).

Plus, it's fun.

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nayefc
Rails is definitely the way to go. In fact, I would go far and say it may be
the most popular framework with startups these days. Knowing how to design
themes (I'm assuming you're a HTML,CSS,JS wiz), learning iOS and knowing Rails
is the ultimate powerful skill-sets all combined.

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robbrit
Ruby (and Rails) is as relevant as ever. The hype about it has died down, just
like the hype of Java was dying when Ruby was becoming the Next Big Thing. Is
Java still relevant today? (Yes) The hype around the technologies of today
(Objective-C, Node.js) will die in a few years as well, it is unlikely that
these languages will become irrelevant.

One of the great things about Rails these days is that many of the startups
that were founded during the hype period of Ruby are now established
companies: Twitter, Shopify, Groupon, Github, LivingSocial, Zendesk. If
startups are not your thing, these are just a few examples of many larger
companies looking (desperately) for people with Ruby on Rails talent.

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dragonwriter
> I am considering joining Team Treehouse (<http://teamtreehouse.com>) and I
> saw they offer RoR tutorials. I was wondering if the language is still
> useful to learn in 2013? This may be a dumb question, but I have heard "bad"
> things about the language from people.

Ruby on Rails isn't a language, its a framework. Ruby the language and Rails
the framework are both still relevant in web application development (and,
Ruby, somewhat beyond that domain), though there are also plenty of other
options, both for languages and frameworks.

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hkarthik
Rails is still relevant, but it's worth having a high performance language in
your back pocket to deal with those high scale problems that Rails is just not
very good at.

Many developers have started leaning on Java, Clojure, Scala, Erlang, Node.js
or Go to fill this role.

If you're just starting out and want to build something that can gain
traction, Rails is a fine choice. Just don't abuse it.

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shire
I have a membership there also, RoR is very widely used by startups nowadays.

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companyhen
How do you like it? I was thinking of trying out the Silver membership for a
month and seeing how it goes.

