To piggyback on that, I personally think Rails is a poor intro to programming - even web development. What it provides in terms of early results is often at the cost of understanding what it does and why.
When we teach (we run an online web development bootcamp), we teach folks Ruby first, then the general web concepts (HTTP, HTML, etc), then lay the foundation of dynamic web programming (rendering templates, routing, etc) with Sinatra, before finally tackling Rails. When we do teach Rails, we stay very close to the framework itself and ask students to build things like authentication from scratch. After they get the core of Rails under their belt, that's when the fun really starts - we introduce comprehensive testing materials, advanced Rails topics, service integrations, complex application workflow, git/github based team collaboration and production app deployment and maintenance concerns.
It takes a while to build up all this from the ground up - but we found this being very effective in pushing people to an intermediate level and build up confidence along the way.
If you think Rails is a poor first choice - what's your recommended language and why?
At the risk of being a little pedantic, I think Ruby is a great choice (Rails being a web framework). Sinatra is much more lightweight Ruby framework that I personally think is more appropriate when starting out. It offers far fewer abstractions (or, "magic") and is a radically simpler beast. To put some numbers on that assertion, the codebase itself is less than 1/100th the size of Rails.
If working with a different language, I recommend starting with some similar level of abstraction. Sinatra-esque frameworks typically offer enough functionality to make development fun while not obfuscating too much of the logic. Spark (Java) is Sinatra inspired. While I've never seriously developed in Python, web.py has been on my to-use list for quite some time.
I started trying to learn Rails at the same time that I was learning Ruby. That was a bad choice and I gave up after a couple months. When I started back at it recently, I dove straight into Ruby alone and left the frameworks out of it. After I felt comfortable enough in Ruby, I added Sinatra and love it.
Rails is powerful, but Sinatra is "just enough" for beginners like us.
Not that integrating Devise when you're new to Rails is all that much fun either.
> Isn't that the type of thing a new dev is very likely
> to get wrong and get burned by?
Hand-rolling your own authentication is trivial in Rails. There are plenty of good tutorials and blog posts about it. There's even a Railscast on it. Rails even has a secure password helper and a digest generator.
You're more likely to get burned by Devise when you want to make trivial customizations to it. You quickly get weird override methods in your User model and rigid behavior from code you can't grep.
I think rolling your own authentication is far more newb-friendly. You're only a handful of lines away from your own `current_user` helper, and you retain full control.