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Nic
Nic

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Learning a bit about... Ruby on Rails

Introduction

I've been spending my Saturdays doing tutorials on languages I'm curious about. This week it's Ruby on Rails.

What I knew about the language before I started

  • It's a framework for Ruby

What I did

Traversy Media's Crash Course, which involved creating a simple blog with posts and comments.

What I thought about the language

I knew Ruby on Rails was a framework and although I found that I needed to be sure of my JavaScript before getting into React, I also know that there are people who go straight into React. And I can see the logic of doing that. I thought I'd try it with this, knowing nothing about Ruby. Although the trouble is that I can't tell you what in the video is specific to Ruby and what is specific to Rails.

There was an amusing moment where he said in the video that Ruby is very English and without lots of punctuation. And then somehow there were a lot of colons... But I could see his point - it was easy to follow.

But I found the organisation hard to follow. Creating a project created a lot of folders and then every time you generated something it created more folders, with different bits in different places. I found myself appreciating the beginner's tutorial style of putting everything in one place, even if that's not best practice, because it's one less thing to think about.

I think if it was going to learn it properly, I'd need to start with something a lot simpler.

What's next?

Fortran. It wasn't originally but I got distracted when browsing YouTube thinking about what to try next. It's not a well-known language, but it's used in Physics. I learnt it at university and spent nearly every day between October and Easter in my 3rd year working on it. But when I recently see a hello world program in Fortran it didn't look familiar at all. Which feels sad when I once knew it. So I'm going to learn it like a beginner.

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