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 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.