Some questions for those with RoR experience…

1. If you know Python, Lua, JS and C, how hard would it be to learn Ruby?

2. What’s the best way to learn Ruby and Rails today?

3. How important is it that you know the previous versions of Rails? I remember looking for some resources a while ago and got a sense that there’s a lot of history that you need to know to really grok the latest version of Rails.

4. I’m worried about all the “magic” in Rails, but at the same time intrigued by the productivity that brings. Is there something that explains what’s going on behind the scenes?

It's not hard to learn just takes time. Easiest route is to find a job that wants experienced programmers but doesn't care if you have rails experience, there's plenty. Second best route is to just build something with it. For context, personally I hate it 3.5 years in, but I can see why people like it. I would learn it because you have colleagues that use it, or there's companies you like that require it. Most people that think it's a silver bullet are just hopping from something they don't like; you'll find just as many people doing the opposite if you ask around.

On point 4 it does make you more productive for run of the mill CRUD work, but now that AI has gotten so good, I'm not actually sure that's a major benefit. I.e. it replaces configuration / boilerplate with magic, but AI can write boilerplate / pattern match really really well. I bet writing in Go saw a huge boost from AI.

1. Your subjective experience learning a new language is going to be up to you and how many languages you know. Ruby feels great from Java and C# to me, but maybe it won't for you.

2. The Rails guides (official) are great to learn the framework.

3. It's only relevant to learn the older versions of the framework if you're going to a company on the older versions. Realistically, 5, 6, 7, and 8 are all very similar and I would argue it's more important to start with the newest stuff and focus on upgrading apps the newest version than trying to learn the older versions (not for any particular reason, other than there have been meaningful improvements in later versions).

4. The source code, contrary to popular belief, is quite well-documented, and the official guides are also very well written. A lot of the "magic" is just DSL/plumbing that exists in the actual framework. I personally keep a copy of rails/rails locally so I can look at things when I want to, because it's really that readable.