Well, now you know one who started out writing machine code. And I'll tell you, don't learn PHP and Rails is a joke and doesn't scale well. But any noob switching to Haskell to do a simple web app is equally insane.
Rails may not scale well, but it's incredibly fast for pumping out CRUD apps. I've seen noobies in Rails move much faster than Node.js projects. Likewise I'm sure someone has seen the opposite.
I'm not here to tell you Rails is better than alternatives, but as programmers we need stop being so scathing in our opinions about other languages or frameworks.
Has it ever occurred to you that somebody may have started learning PHP, or Ruby/Rails, or Perl, or Java, simply because that was the only viable option available to them within the trajectories of their lives that would allow them to make a living? I know people learning Ruby who out of economic necessity had to switch to PHP to land a good paying job. This is particulary true in smaller cities where opportunities are far more scarce.
Switching to PHP is not a choice that I would personally want to make, but I do not judge or think less of programmers who end up doing this when they're first starting out because they have to.
I find that those who start out with PHP cause they have to are working for companies who presume you need PHP and a database for anything related to the web but could never explain to you a technical reason for it.
We don't use a "web language" unless you include our use of javascript. We make custom sites using C cause we can and it does everything any other language does. We just might switch to Go cause it already contains the libraries we wrote for C years ago but Go makes it more universal to those outside our company.
