ERB is extremely similar to PHP and regular HTML. CSS and Javascript will already be familiar to someone who has done development in other languages.
Call it FUD (despite the fact that I do all my development in Rails) but the issue isn't the reality, it's the perception. You make these the defaults for Rails and/or you write the new user tutorials in them, and you increase the perceived difficulty of starting to use Rails. You make them options that more advanced users can choose to turn on, you reduce that friction. That's all I'm saying.
To clarify: I'm pro HAML, SASS/SCSS and I like the idea of Coffeescript even though I'm not using it. I just think that some of the way the've been going with Rails is not great from the perspective of growing the adoption of the platform.
And yeah, my mistake about HAML. I've been using it so long with Rails I've forgotten it's not a default.
I find the quality of javascript produced through coffeescript is much higher than devs who proclaim competency with javascript. Even the simple stuff (using closures properly, and '===')
I've found a lot of devs while they have been 'trained' in C/Java/Pyhon/Ruby have kind of just picked up bits and pieces of javascript without a really a firm understanding of how it works or it's idioms. Coffeescript on the other hand, has a very (python-esque) prescriptive set of idioms that produces very decent javascript, if you don't follow the idioms, it doesn't compile.
For an absolute "i know nothing" I think the Ruby, Rails, HAML, SASS, Coffescript is a smaller learning curve than ERB, CSS, Javascript.
Call it FUD (despite the fact that I do all my development in Rails) but the issue isn't the reality, it's the perception. You make these the defaults for Rails and/or you write the new user tutorials in them, and you increase the perceived difficulty of starting to use Rails. You make them options that more advanced users can choose to turn on, you reduce that friction. That's all I'm saying.
To clarify: I'm pro HAML, SASS/SCSS and I like the idea of Coffeescript even though I'm not using it. I just think that some of the way the've been going with Rails is not great from the perspective of growing the adoption of the platform.
And yeah, my mistake about HAML. I've been using it so long with Rails I've forgotten it's not a default.