I agree also. It seems that there are also overlapping issues that go
together with Rails programming. I would like to be able to be great at
Ruby programming too. I picked up a book on “Scripting Intelligence” and
while the author speaks of doing things in Rails, there is so much Ruby
programming in the text.
On wikipedia Drupal is in the same classification as Ruby, as a
“framework.” Not sure if it fits but I find myself getting ignored in my
requests there. I have to admit that I don’t have that experience
here. I do seem to get responses to my questions – even when I annoy
others with my naiveté.
This could be a topic in itself but anyway, I bought that book the Rails
Tutorial. It struck me as somewhat overwhelming the programming in Rails
can be. For example, in section 1.2 of the tutorial, the author writes,
“(Also beware that lots of things can go wrong. For example, on my system
the latest version of Ruby 1.8.7 won’t compile; instead after much searching and
hand-wringing, I discovered that I needed ‘patchlevel’ number 174:
$ rvm install 1.8.7-p174
When things like this happen to you, it’s always frustrating, but at least
you know that it happens to everyone...)”
Ok, the problem is that the author didn’t say how he determined what
patchlevel he needed... So, I had mixed feelings... on the one hand there
is the consolation in knowing that the difficulty one is having just getting
started is not a unique experience for you coming to RoR. On the other
hand, this is extremely daunting for a newbie to Rails. With other
languages, usually backwards compatibility is maintained for a certain period of
time. For example, you can run PHP 4.x.y on a system with PHP 5.3.x but
not necessarily the other way around. As a matter of fact, I’m not aware
of any other language I’ve used that had anywhere near the level of potential
things that could go wrong.
I don’t mean to discredit RoR but to see how one can get a handle on this
issue. I wonder why one would need such a specific version of
Ruby? In my case it was only Rails that created any kind of problem.
Ruby was easy enough to get up and running.
Bruce