There seems to be a silent disagreement on what the goal of a beginner is: Is it to become a better programmer or is it to get a working app with the minimal am

There seems to be a silent disagreement on what the goal of a beginner is: Is it to become a better programmer or is it to get a working app with the minimal amount of work? Sinatra seems to be better for the former, Rails is better for the latter. I'm partial to thinking that the former goal is the more noble. But I'm also immensely proud to work in a field that allows anyone with little more than motivation and patience to apply the immense power of computing to whatever itch they need scratched. One of my favourite consulting jobs of all times was when a friend of a friend asked me to come in: They knew just enough of a certain PHP CMS to build an online history textbook, which they'd then gone on to sell to, oh, well, every school in the country. The traffic was strangling them and only just knew enough that they knew they didn't have a clue what to do. A week and change later, upgraded hardware and the clumsy CMS search engine replace by Solr, they were flying. If they'd started out with the equivalent of Sinatra (essentially plain PHP), I'm not sure they'd have launched at all.