That's a cool idea but I wonder if this is too complicated for the average beginner? I did COmsci in school but I did not easily understand how the DOM and xmlhttp API related...I was a perfect example of the programmer who Crockford says is wrong for hating JS because all we did was run to jQuery (and he's right)
I can't imagine how frustrating it is for a total beginner to understand the mechanisms, even if they are web desires with some experience with the DOM.
The good thing about teaching a language like Ruby or Python is that you don't have to build a webpage. In fact, most people are very content with not publishing on the web...and so they are reluctant to study JS because they think it's only for web development.
But with Ruby, you could write something that sucks in Craigslist results and reformat it so that you don't have to click through to see the pics...and then store it as a local file that is written to every 5 hours...I did this plenty of time when doing a furniture search...
I know you can hack Google tables/fusion to do some of this, but that's a whole new layer of things to learn...whereas everyone gets basic text files existing on the HD
It's funny you say that actually because I would fall into the category of being all about the web. I'm self taught and learned 100% in a web environment. I actually didn't have any experience with pure scripting (data-mining and processing) until my job required it a couple years back.
I think it probably just comes down to preference. I'm positive that a large portion of people that "want to learn to program" really mean "make a web application", but that's not to say that scripting isn't equally rewarding/fun. HN is filled with cool posts about how to make little command-line utilities that do xyz -- yes very nice indeed!
Lastly, FWIW, I sure am glad you say "ruby" as opposed to "rails" because I can't imagine the DOM being harder to learn than everything that rails is taking care of for you under the hood.
Yeah...I'm not saying they shouldn't be about the web...as I fit in that boat too. But when I think of most of the web creations I've produced, virtually all of them have come from being able to crunch/gather data (even if it's just spitting out HTML for every row in a dataset) at an efficient speed...when you have that much info, the incentive to publish is greater :)
But yeah, ruby != rails. That is most definitely something I clear the air about right away.
I can't imagine how frustrating it is for a total beginner to understand the mechanisms, even if they are web desires with some experience with the DOM.
The good thing about teaching a language like Ruby or Python is that you don't have to build a webpage. In fact, most people are very content with not publishing on the web...and so they are reluctant to study JS because they think it's only for web development.
But with Ruby, you could write something that sucks in Craigslist results and reformat it so that you don't have to click through to see the pics...and then store it as a local file that is written to every 5 hours...I did this plenty of time when doing a furniture search...
I know you can hack Google tables/fusion to do some of this, but that's a whole new layer of things to learn...whereas everyone gets basic text files existing on the HD