Hacker News Reader

Oh definitely. I picked up Rails without doing a single line of Ruby beforehand, and I think that's true for many of the Rails devs I know. Knowing Python is a plus, much of the language is gonna make basic sense.

For me, the big hurdles early were Blocks, which seem strange at first but make sense, and some of the metaprogramming stuff which you can definitely ignore to start and be just fine.

View on HN

This was what I did when I was playing with Rails, but I felt like I was missing a lot about the fundamentals of the language. Especially because Ruby has a very free syntax, and steps far away from other languages in terms of syntax, I was able to copy things and make it work, but it was harder for me to really get the language than with many others.

Oh definitely, but for me I was never gonna be able to learn Ruby in a vacuum. If I had needed a general-purpose scripting language in 2007 I'd have reached for PHP or Perl, both of which I knew from web dev.

But with Rails I had a reason to pick up Ruby in the first place. So I didn't know a damn thing about metaprogramming or duck-typing going in, but I knew Rails was lightning and I wanted to capture it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com