Ruby on Rails career question

[Node_Pointer]

Are there many opportunities, career wise, for spending time and learning this? I hear alot about it but I do not know if it is going to be around for awhile, or is just a fad. Just wondering. Any information would be great
thx

 

[ameoba]

It's not like J2EE/.NET but there's jobs out there for it. A smaller pool of jobs but also a smaller pool of candidates. You're likely to be working for younger, smaller more "forward thinking" companies than you would be with J2EE/.NET which is more likely to get you into wearing a suit & writing payroll systems for Fortune 500 companies.

 

[amromousa]

...

I like your sig. I had to take an OO design process class and write software using Squeak (Smalltalk 80 offshoot also by Alan Kay, if I'm not mistaken).

 

[Fryguy8]

If you are looking to learn programming languages simply for monetary gain, then you probably aren't a very good programmer, and aren't going to be successful in the field anyway.

With that said, ror is one of the fastest growing web technologies available today. Learning it is going to make you a better programmer, whether you end up using it or not.

Learning a language for strictly the purpose of making a career out of it is foolish and liable to get you pigeonholed with not much of a future in 10 years. 10 years ago, nobody was programming in J2EE/.NET, nowadays it's what everybody uses. 10 years from now it will be something different.

Learn HOW to program, don't focus on a specific language. If you actually know how to program, then you can pick up whatever you want in a small timeframe.

 

[maw]

Learn HOW to program, don't focus on a specific language. If you actually know how to program, then you can pick up whatever you want in a small timeframe.

definitely true. once you know how to program, learning a new language is usually just a matter of learning new syntax and function libraries. the basic principles of programming very rarely change from one language to another, you're still going to evaluate conditionals, still going to need loops, and still pass values back and forth to subroutines.

the hardest part of a new language is often not the language itself, but the platform it's designed for. I spent a more time learning how to configure a server for PHP than it took to learn PHP itself.