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What language easiest for proof of concept?
Background: After getting a CS minor, I worked as a C programmer in the early 90s, then on the business-side for big tech, and I've come to entrepreneurship in my 40s.
Today: I have a number of startup ideas which involve some web presence. Since I don't have a technical co-founder, I expect to have to prove my concept by building a bare-bones site myself - to attract co-founder or funding. So I'm learning web technologies on CodeAcademy.
Question: Of the the many options in CodeAcademy, in what order should I learn them, and (if I first learn Ruby on Rails, which seems very elegant to program), do I even need to learn PHP, JavaScript, JQuery, and/or Python?
Summary: My goal is to create a bare-bones proof of concept, and I have zero programming experience since last typing make on my C code in mid-1995. Is Ruby on Rails sufficient?
Thanks.
- lsiunsuex 14y agoA couple months ago my wife's day job started shopping for a new website. They got a few quotes, then asked me. Prior to walking into the meeting, I framed out the front end using Bootstrap, built a simple CMS to convey my ideas and had a few sample pages laid out how I envisioned redoing things and I got the job (one of my biggest $$$$$ jobs to date) Now obviously, being married to an employee, I had some insider knowledge, but I'm 1 person compared to some of the quotes they got from companies with armies of programmers. IMO, showing the customer (or investor) is night and day different than telling the customer. You don't have to do a lot; I spent < 10 hours on the demo - but it was something they could use / play with (I left them the URL of the test site) and talk about amongst themselves. Anyways, like I said; I prototype in Bootstrap - it offers a lot of nifty features that provide nice eye candy (modals, tooltips, button bars, etc...). My backends are always in PHP so I wrote the CMS in that. Do you need PHP, Ruby, etc... in a demo? no, probably not, but it wont hurt to learn it for communicating whoever you take on as a tech person. jQuery is a must now a days; everyone wants it even if they don't know what it is exactly. Ruby or PHP or Python are a matter of opinion I think. Some people hate PHP, I love PHP and hate Ruby. All a matter of what you need to get the job done IMO.
- auctiontheory 14y agoThanks, very helpful. I'm taking their jQuery({}) class now; I've seen Bootstrap in action - mistakenly thought it was tied to Ruby. Dynamic resizing for mobile was pretty impressive. Will check it out next. (I assume it must have some limitations.) So many (good) choices!
- argonaut 14y agoYou would need to learn HTML, CSS, Javascript, and jQuery (you seem to be well on your way here). On the backend, you only need to learn one of the following three: Ruby, Python, or PHP. Again, it's a matter of taste. Personally, I come from the startup world, and we all dislike PHP, so you'll find few Bay Area / SF startups using that anymore. That being said, if you know a friend who knows Ruby (and Ruby on Rails), Python (and Django), or PHP (and a PHP CMS or CakePHP), then that would be best.
- auctiontheory 14y agoOkay. This may all be obvious to others here, but is super helpful for me. Thanks. I really like the look of Ruby, so I'll focus on Ruby on Rails for the back end, and maybe learn just enough PHP to be able to tweak my Wordpress blog. Cool.