My solution was simply to recommend personalized tutoring via RailsMentors.org - as you can really learn from any development stack. It's just finding the right combination that can be very difficult for a new developer.
You bring up some very good suggestions - we need a better metric for whether things are stable, supported, etc. And you're absolutely right, Google won't work, and download counts won't work. I would be interested in seeing something like you've suggested though, essentially coming up with a "trust" system for different libraries.
At the same time, you have the experience available to test whether a gem runs on 1.8 or 1.9, where a new developer doesn't know how to read stack traces yet. Providing one-on-one support helps tackle this issue (RailsMentors.org), as would increased tutorials that try and _limit_ the range of choice, rather than overload the developer with too much.
Of course, these are just my own thoughts on how we can address the problem. I'm hopeful that by discussing it, people can come up with some additional solutions.
You bring up some very good suggestions - we need a better metric for whether things are stable, supported, etc. And you're absolutely right, Google won't work, and download counts won't work. I would be interested in seeing something like you've suggested though, essentially coming up with a "trust" system for different libraries.
At the same time, you have the experience available to test whether a gem runs on 1.8 or 1.9, where a new developer doesn't know how to read stack traces yet. Providing one-on-one support helps tackle this issue (RailsMentors.org), as would increased tutorials that try and _limit_ the range of choice, rather than overload the developer with too much.
Of course, these are just my own thoughts on how we can address the problem. I'm hopeful that by discussing it, people can come up with some additional solutions.