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I went from Ruby to JavaScript development. First, I’d like to say I think starting with Ruby/Rails is a bad idea. Ruby uses a lot of higher order functions, bu

I went from Ruby to JavaScript development. First, I’d like to say I think starting with Ruby/Rails is a bad idea. Ruby uses a lot of higher order functions, but it isn’t super clear from the syntax how that all works. Higher order functions in JS are much more clear, IMO, on account of having to use parens to call the function (in Ruby, you don’t need parens to call function, you can just name the function and delineate the arguments with spaces). So with Ruby, I was just pattern matching—I never had an intuition of what lambdas were doing until I moved over to JS. The Feynman Method was another aha moment. Learning how to learn, in my case, by writing down stuff in my own words as if I were teaching someone else was probably the most important thing. That helped me develop a much deeper understanding of important concepts. Similarly, not trying to learn everything was a big deal. Don’t try to learn all the niche technologies you see in job listings expecting you need to know those things in order to qualify for the position. If you just do dozens of tutorials, you’ll end up knowing a lot of things very superficially. It’s much better to know a handful of ubiquitous, related technologies very well and have a strong foundation of programming fundamentals. Those things can transfer over to other technologies, when you need to pick them up.

temporallobe 6y ago
I agree on your sentiments about Ruby/Rails. Rails also applies the philosophy of convention over configuration, so newcomers can’t usually just intuit what’s going on — you have to know their specific conventions, which also seem to change with each major release. And one of my pet peeves about Ruby as a language is the optional use of parentheses for function definitions and calls, making it harder to read through code quickly. In C-style syntax languages, it’s very obvious at a glance where functions are being called. Not so with Ruby.
greenleaf3 6y ago
> Similarly, not trying to learn everything was a big deal. This is one of my recent decision. Previously I would jump to every shiny frameworks and try to learn every fancy programming languages. This drained my energy so much I had to stop doing it. Instead I have decided to learn ubiquitous tools e.g math, algorithms and data structures, etc.
Doctor_Fegg 6y ago
> First, I’d like to say I think starting with Ruby/Rails is a bad idea. It's telling that comments like this inevitably involve Rails, not plain Ruby. Rails's "magick" is obfuscatory and at times counter-intuitive. Ruby, the language, is pretty straightforward. I wish more people spent time playing with Ruby before diving into Rails.

temporallobe 6y ago

I agree on your sentiments about Ruby/Rails. Rails also applies the philosophy of convention over configuration, so newcomers can’t usually just intuit what’s going on — you have to know their specific conventions, which also seem to change with each major release. And one of my pet peeves about Ruby as a language is the optional use of parentheses for function definitions and calls, making it harder to read through code quickly. In C-style syntax languages, it’s very obvious at a glance where functions are being called. Not so with Ruby.

greenleaf3 6y ago

> Similarly, not trying to learn everything was a big deal. This is one of my recent decision. Previously I would jump to every shiny frameworks and try to learn every fancy programming languages. This drained my energy so much I had to stop doing it. Instead I have decided to learn ubiquitous tools e.g math, algorithms and data structures, etc.

Doctor_Fegg 6y ago

> First, I’d like to say I think starting with Ruby/Rails is a bad idea. It's telling that comments like this inevitably involve Rails, not plain Ruby. Rails's "magick" is obfuscatory and at times counter-intuitive. Ruby, the language, is pretty straightforward. I wish more people spent time playing with Ruby before diving into Rails.