As a novice developer, I absolutely loathed scaffolding (IDE-generated header and source files) because I could never understand why all the code got there, how do those files relate and what does it do.

I tried to learn COM once but gave up essentially because I could not find any docs not falling back on IDE code generation (and that code was huge and absolutely opaque).

I always loved tools which let you to type in a small program from the scratch and run it. So, perhaps, sinatra is the way to go for beginners.

I didn't find the scaffolding that difficult to understand, because I've used CakePHP before, but what gets me in Rails is the magic helper keywords. For instance: ActiveRecord.find_by_columnname(value), {controller}_path, {controller}_url.

I'm fairly certain that's not all of them, but I don't even know what those things are called to look for them. Those 3 are covered in a lot of tutorials without really explaining the full list of stuff Rails does for you automatically.

I guess everyone is different since scaffolding always scared me when I was a beginner. It felt like entering an existing code base not knowing where things should go and what you are allowed to edit, except unlike a real code base none of the functionality is there making it even harder to figure out where to put things.

I have always preferred to start simple and localized and add complexity as the project goes. Especially when I am learning something new.