I'm one of the maintainers of the project, I think that Ruby is still a good language for beginners to learn programming.
Ruby has very expressive syntax, allowing beginners to focus more on the core programming concepts. Its object model also makes it a nice language to learn the basics and best practices of OOP.
The resources out there for beginner programmers and Ruby are also top notch and the community is very friendly to beginners.
This is completely anecdotal, but we've had a fairly decent number of students come into the chat rooms telling us they started with javascript as a beginner but weren't getting it, ruby was much easier for them to get up to grips with.
I admit that I've seen a few students put off with the magic in Ruby, but those really have been a very small minority of students compared to those who really embraced learning it.
In saying all this, we have plans to focus more of our efforts on Javascript and give students the option to choose a javascript track in the curriculum.
Ruby has very expressive syntax, allowing beginners to focus more on the core programming concepts. Its object model also makes it a nice language to learn the basics and best practices of OOP.
The resources out there for beginner programmers and Ruby are also top notch and the community is very friendly to beginners.
This is completely anecdotal, but we've had a fairly decent number of students come into the chat rooms telling us they started with javascript as a beginner but weren't getting it, ruby was much easier for them to get up to grips with.
I admit that I've seen a few students put off with the magic in Ruby, but those really have been a very small minority of students compared to those who really embraced learning it.
In saying all this, we have plans to focus more of our efforts on Javascript and give students the option to choose a javascript track in the curriculum.