[zalambar]

I find it interesting to see how many new developers, and perhaps problematically teachers of new developers, set out to learn programming via web development in Rails. I like Rails. Rails enables developers to solve a common class of problems efficiently and productively. There's tremendous demand for developers who can be productive using Rails. Those are all good reasons to learn the language and framework but if I had to go back and learn to program again I wonder if I would have been successful or enjoyed starting with Rails and Ruby.

Providing a beginner friendly environment and introduction to programming was never one of the motivations behind Rails. If that's a role it can play well then that is all the better. I want tools to exist which help more people learn to program and which give them the satisfaction of being able to build useful applications quickly. However I think it unfair to take a framework which set out to make reasonable decisions about a fairly well defined class of problems in order to make experienced developers more productive in that domain and blame it for being a poor platform to learn programming on.

When is it fair to "hate Rails" and when should we being saying "wow, I guess there is a lot to learn about building software"?