I noticed a trend. Clojure is awesome. And most Clojurists seem to use Rails. As such, I thought it would be worth investigating for myself.

As far as scripting languages go, I encountered Python first, and I loved it for its simplicity. Very few languages are as readable and make expressing complicated ideas easy. At least, at first. Anyway, I never bothered with Ruby seriously. It didn’t seem that there was anything it offered that Python didn’t. And I already knew Python pretty well. Overall, it seemed that Python was used for any number of things: data science, SysOps, computer vision. There seemed to be no reason to spend time learning a new language when I could just become more proficient in the one I already knew.

Still, something about Rails struck a chord with me. It’s such an enormous thing to learn, yet people swear by it. Today, after hours of messing around with the awesome Overtone library, I decided to take a break from Clojure for the day and try something else. I looked up Michael Hartl’s well-known Rails tutorial. I’m only through two chapters, but even so, I think I get it.

Rails is big, but it is also powerful. Without the scaffolding, it would be a beast to wrap one’s brain around. Either way, the way it is structured is fantastic. Even after a few hours, what I’ve learned just makes sense.

I’m really excited to learn more. But that’s all for today!