Currently learning Rails - tempted to switch to JS

This summer I began my path to becoming a full stack programmer from scratch. I starting off learning Ruby, HTML, CSS, a bit of JS and am now in the middle of learning rails.

I love Ruby. It’s a very elegant language. But rails I find very frustrating. I feel it’s about learning alot of conventions and patterns without understanding too much why and how it works, which is the way I learn.

I’m up to chapter 8 in the rails tutorial and at this point I feel like I’m just copying and pasting code without fully understanding it. The MVC stuff, DB, REST and OO stuff I kinda get. But anything about helpers and tests really wants to make me tear my hair out.

At the same time, I’ve been tempted by JS. The idea of using one language seems very appealing. Also have a friend who’s learning JS and I really like the FCC cirriculum. In fact I’ve already done the first few parts of the Front-End portion.

So, should I stick with rails or move on to JS?

Curious to hear your thoughts, especially from people who have learned both. Which one did you prefer?

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Testing is no less challenging in JavaScript, I think. As I recall, a helper is just a collection of singletons on a module that you include into your controller. As I recall, you can then use them in both the controller and views rendered within that controller.

As you’ve seen, Ruby is a fun language and Rails remains an in-demand skill set. I don’t think you can go wrong using Rails for the API and full stack projects. As you learn JavaScript on the front end, much of what you learn will be applicable on the backend if you want to learn NodeJS and Express or some other framework. I’m looking at Sails, which is analogous to Rails.

There are definitely days I miss my Ruby.