When we first discovered Rails in 2005, developers were coming from an age where PHP back-end sites were getting increasingly complex and were becoming difficult to manage and scale. Rails excelled in this world, where the goal was still to develop HTML/CSS-centric web interfaces with heavy back-ends. Rails consolidated many best practices in back-end web development and made it easier for developers to build large sites in an organized way.
A lot has changed since 2005, however. Companies today want to give users highly interactive and responsive experiences that don’t require a page refresh at every step. As a result, the web is dominated by “single page” applications or SPAs written in JavaScript using frameworks like React or Ember.js–making JavaScript one of the best programming languages to learn. Increasingly, the role of Rails has shifted to serve as an API layer to the back-end of web applications.
JavaScript also offers professional advantages over other languages. Fullstack Academy graduates are well-rounded coders with both a thorough understanding of the full stack and programming concepts in general. We’ve learned through years of tech education that students may more easily understand and master other coding languages once they’ve learned full stack JavaScript. This gives them a more in-demand skill set that separates them from the competition and widens the range of coding job types they’re qualified for.