Hi my 12 year old, WIX, is an amazing auto deductive computer whiz. I have to keep up... He is an excellent VB programmer and knows JAVA. I have been told ROR is the future. I want to guide WIX so he can build up a good methodical working knowledge but don't want him to waste his time on archaic languages that will not be around soon...Should his next step be ROR or would you recommend something else? Thnx!
wixmom wrote:
Hi my 12 year old, WIX, is an amazing auto deductive computer whiz. I have to keep up... He is an excellent VB programmer and knows JAVA. I have been told ROR is the future.
It is the present. RoR (the platform) is much better than platforms like ASP.NET & Tomcat (VB & Java, respectively), and it uses the language Ruby, which has leading-edge Object Oriented features.
I want to guide WIX so he can build up a good methodical working knowledge but don't want him to waste his time on archaic languages that will not be around soon...Should his next step be ROR or would you recommend something else? Thnx!
Not to worry. (And happy vicarious fathers' day!)
RoR will not waste your time. You can typically get things done in like 1/2 the time and 1/10th the code of corporate platforms. A lot of its development leverages automatically deducing things. When you do that, Ruby is _much_ more likely to do what you expect, compared to VB or Java. Also, RoR supports "unit tests". If your offspring learns to use those, he will become a better programmer than like 80% of the professionals.
Well. I don't know about RoR being the future but I've been seeing a
bunch of want ads for Cobol, RPG/ILE and Lotus script/formula language
lately. I started my first programming job programming on AS/400s in
RPG/ILE which I learned on the job because no one else knew it.
My best programming class in college focused on game theory in C.
Before that I just did small web applications and it helped me look at
the bigger picture. So you may want him to learn those languages to
see what is really going on behind the scenes as RoR does a lot of the
work for you.
For starters we gotta get the kid off of VB and Java ASAP. Take 3 RoR's
a day for the next few months and hopefully we will see some recovery 
Honestly, Rails isn't the be all end all, but it is something new and that is what's important. It is also a lot of fun, so it is a win win situation.
