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Comment by MatthewPhillips | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. If someone is starting Ruby for the first time, the last thing they want is to be forced to learn another new language on top of learning Ruby. Then mix in Sass and Haml, and you're giving them a good reason not to even bother.

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Rails has always been optimized for people who use it all day, every day, rather than those using it for the first time.

Who's forcing? Javascript will work just fine.

It's a valid point, though. "So, it's your first Rails app, eh? Do you know Ruby? No? Do you know HAML and SCSS and Coffeescript? No? OK, step 1 in this new framework that you know nothing about is to figure out how to change the defaults."

This change definitely has the existing Rails community in mind.

Or as I told my friend: "Given that you already know how to create a blog in 5 seconds, how can we also make you not have to use semicolons in your JS?"

Web development is already a field full of these things:

So it's your first web page, eh? Do you know HTML? No? Do you know CSS and JavaScript? No? Okay, the first step is to figure out how CPanel and PuTTY work ... what? What do you mean Microsoft Word isn't a real text editor? I edited my whole thesis on it. IDE? Isn't that like a hard drive? WTF?

Ok but you don't have to 'change' any 'defaults' to use regular plain javascript. You just don't write coffeescript. The new 'default' is to include the coffeescript dependency and generate script stubs with a .coffee extension. Write a js file and all will be as it was, with a slightly fatter bundle.

You can make the same argument for "forcing" them to learn JavaScript, HTML and CSS—which would be a similarly silly argument to make.

Learning Ruby via Rails seems like the hardest thing you listed. Haml, SCSS and CoffeeScript can all be eased into gradually.

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