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Ruby

Jay McGavren
STAFF
Jay McGavren
Treehouse Teacher

Retiring "Learn Ruby" track, keeping "Rails Development" track

Hey, folks,

Just a heads up that we'll be retiring the "Learn Ruby" track in the next few weeks. Most of its content is getting merged into the "Rails Development" track anyway, and we don't want to confuse new students with a choice between Ruby and Rails tracks when the overwhelming majority will be moving on to Rails anyway.

For those that are in the Ruby track, we'll be getting in touch about moving over to the Rails track.

Thanks as always for learning with us!

Corina Meyer
Corina Meyer
9,990 Points

i think that really is a sad evolution. i am a fan of ruby and gave a number of talks on it. in each single one i was asked if ruby and rails isn't the same but it definitely isn't. there are rails-less ways to develop (wep-)apps with ruby and those are a lot more fun and more suitable to the basic idea of ruby than rails will ever be (for it being meant to be a programming language that's easy to use and read by humans, not only computers). i would appreciate it if you could show some of these (e.g. sinatra) instead of increasing the number of people who think ruby and rails are the same.

5 Answers

Kevin Elliott
Kevin Elliott
15,653 Points

I'm a Rubyist, as well as a long time Rails developer (since 2007!) and I'd like to say that this saddens me. It seems to me that it undervalues Ruby as a standalone language. There are a lot of other frameworks that are profitable and in use over Rails that are built on Ruby, and it could be counterproductive to the Ruby ecosystem to only focus on Rails.

That said, I also value Rails a lot, and I'm happy to see your continued and renewed interest in the Rails ecosystem moving forward.

I totally think that's a bad idea... For new Rubyists, they'll probably be looking for a nice and basic track about Ruby. I think you should keep the Ruby Basics track. It is a great track for beginners and also if you only have the Ruby on Rails track they might think Ruby is Ruby on Rails, which is totally false... :)

I vote for keeping the Ruby Basics track! :smile:

~Alex

EDITED

Kevin Kirsche
Kevin Kirsche
9,588 Points

I'm pretty against this honestly. I think this adds to the problem of new Ruby programmers thinking rails is Ruby and vice versa and not being able to branch out to things like Sinatra. This is a sad and in my opinion horrible decision that I don't support at all.

Jay McGavren
STAFF
Jay McGavren
Treehouse Teacher

I do have good news for those concerned that this might keep new Ruby developers from discovering Sinatra, etc.: We'll be including a course on Sinatra in the Rails track. In fact, we'll be presenting it before any Rails content, since we view it as a good stepping stone to Rails. (Although Sinatra certainly has merits on its own as well!)

Jay McGavren
STAFF
Jay McGavren
Treehouse Teacher

Everyone, after looking more carefully at this, we've decided that the Rails track would become unwieldy with all the core Ruby content merged into it. We'll be keeping both the "Learn Ruby" and "Rails Development" tracks after all.

Thanks for your patience, and sorry for the false alarm!

Kevin Elliott
Kevin Elliott
15,653 Points

Hooray! I'm glad we were able to have a conversation about this, and then you guys were able to investigate and come to some resolve. This process (not just the outcome) only reinforces my love for Treehouse and all of you behind the scenes. Thank you Jay!

Yay! :)