Re:Enlighten me (Score 1)

If you like the ruby on rails concept but you are more familiar with PHP you would do yourself a favor to check out phpCake. It is basically Ruby on Rails using PHP instead of Ruby for its language. I am currently working on a big project using this framework and it has gone fairly smoothly. phpCake IS still fairly immature but already very usable for almost any website. Progress is coming along nicely and it isn't too far from being a very powerful PHP framework. Also, in reference to the main story, I taught myself how to program in C/C++ beginning at the age of 8 and I think it is probably the best language to learn with. I am surprised that no one else has said this. Why wouldn't you want to first learn the language that is the syntactical template that probably 80%+ of the other languages are based on? Remember that a newb isn't actually making a full featured application he is just playing around with the language. And the fact that it doesn't do much for you automatically means that you end up learning allot more about how the PC is actually working. Things like pointers and memory locations most language try to hide you from which is a good thing when developing real world applications but when you are learning I think it is good to be aware of these things. From my point of view the only real problems with learning in C/C++ is the fact that it takes a few more seconds to compile and sometimes the error messages can be a little cryptic. If I learned to program using Ruby I really don't think much of the syntax of most other languages would make much sense to me. I base this theory on the fact that when I look at Ruby code it seems very foreign to me even though I'm comfortable in a ton of other languages ranging from VB to PHP to ASM. Maybe it is because I learned in C/C++ that I have trouble reading Ruby code but whatever the reason I find it hard to believe that learning Ruby is going to help a newb as much when they go to learn other language other languages.