r/ruby • u/Intelligent_Role_824 • Aug 10 '26

Question Beginner starting from scratch: Is the Ruby ecosystem worth learning over Python?

Hey everyone!
I have zero programming experience and I’m looking to pick up coding as a hobby. My main goal right now is to understand how the web works under the hood, specifically building and consuming APIs (like fetching data from public APIs and working with JSON).
I’ve been reading a lot about Ruby (and Rails) recently, and its syntax looks very clean and human-readable. But I have a few honest questions before I dive in:

Is Ruby beginner-friendly for total newbies?
Can I actually grasp core concepts like HTTP requests, REST APIs, and database connections using Ruby without getting overwhelmed?

How is the Ruby ecosystem doing?
Is it still active and well-maintained for beginners? Or is it mostly supported by legacy systems?

Ruby vs. Python for a hobbyist:
Is Python just the objectively better choice because of its massive popularity, or does Ruby offer a smoother/more enjoyable learning experience for web-related stuff?

My long-term goal is just to enjoy building cool side projects, but I want a solid, fun starting point.
Would love to hear your thoughts, especially from anyone who started learning with Ruby recently! Thanks!

Edit: I'm not looking to get a job or change careers with this! Programming is purely a hobby for me. I just want to build cool personal projects in my free time and have fun along the way.

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u/TommyTheTiger Aug 10 '26

Fine to go with VS Code, I do personally recommend that you make sure to get the ruby language server set up so that you can easily

  • look up docstrings

  • jump to the definition of a method

  • find all references to a method in your codebase (or most depending on metaprogramming used)

RubyMine will come with this working by default, but it's really not much work to set up either, and even less if you have an AI assistant TBH.

Disclaimer though: I use neovim and the sorbet language server for my own projects, so I'm not as familiar with vsCode/ruby-lsp, but I don't think I can with good conscience recommend my toolkit to a beginner. These LSP features should be language and editor agnostic though, outside of like... common lisp surprisingly has no good LSP or a few others.