I still don't exactly understand what you're trying to build. Can you offer some betas for us to see how it works?Thanks.

it's not my app, but I'm in their beta. With Kards you can enter things you want to remember (bookmarks, recipies, quotes, movies, books etc.) in a really simple and smart way (natural language processing). The software itself takes care of organizing these items and makes it really easy to find them again. Right now they try to find as many use cases as possible.

they have a post on how their beta works. Also it still doesn't say much more about the app itself: http://kards.io/blog/how_the_kards_private_beta_works.html

Thanks, I'll definitely email you about the book.Perhaps I will even make some suggestions.

Thank you for your adivce, I will definitely email you some questions I have. I wanted to learn PHP but it was not recommended by other people.

A few years seems reasonable but when people go straight into rails and build apps in a few months without any prior knowledge I'm starting to think if i should go on that path as well.

The reason I'm asking is because I see people building apps after learning rails in 4-6 months which to me translates to skipping and/or poor quality coding. I might as well be wrong about it but it seems too easy judging by how hard it looks like...

There are a few possibilities but the easiest one is to come up with something that would radically change the way we interact with the web.

I say, the first company to create a True AI will dethrone any company on the market with ease. Or a company coming up with a product for a totally different market and dominating it and then after capturing users, offering features of other competing companies like FB is doing now. You need a really Big Buzz as well.

I am usually able to predict with a 95.4% accuracy some parts of the future ( no arrogance intended) so I strongly believe one of these things will happen in the near future.

True AI will dethrone IP of entire humanity. It will be interesting times when (human intelligence) << (machine intelligence) and you get machine intelligence for free.

A lot of people recommended me ruby but I feel like I'm loosing the foundation of programming and maybe somewhere along the line I won't understand something because I skipped it.

This is correct. Start with something like C#, Java or Go.

Thanks for the reply. Luckily I am not gonna start from scratch scratch since I have a little experience with front-end and I am "familiar" so to speak, with the programming "environment" but I never really dived into it (a very stupid decision).

So for:

1. Some people told me I should start with C and go on from there, while others told me to start with C# or Python. Am I wasting time with C? I've seen some articles here where some guys went straight RoR and managed to get an app running in months. I feel like I would skip important stuff if I do that. How important is the order in which you learn these? I think this is the hardest thing for me. To choose which one goes first on the backend side I mean.

2. So it shouldn't be a problem to go for an old mac right? I don't have 2K right now for a maxed MBP.

3. Well I figured I can do it on a 10-15h a day marathon for 4-6 months. So I can't do a YC demo for example?Something to show to investors or enough to express an idea?

4. I believe I got this covered although everyone is pretty busy these days:)

I am actually working for a startup who is prepping an app for investors approval, and what we have found is speed, and progress is important. I would definitely recommend RoR because the speed to development is so critical. With Rails it isn't unrealistic to have a MVP within 3 months. Especially with 10-15 hours a day.

And you can get a macbook air for around $900-$1300. That's all you really need, nothing fancy.

And if your app is meant to be mobile, you can get deep into mobile web development and even create a very native experience. That's what forecast.io did.

Also as you probably know, in startups it's more about proving a model than having a fancy piece of software. Think about what features are going to attract customers asap. Iteration is easier when you have customers giving you feedback.

IMO RoR is the fastest way to make those vital iterations. Once you're sitting on your $5 million in venture cash you can worry about architecture and scalability.

I've seen some online courses like CS50 with C and MIT with Python. The question is why are they starting with those programming languages and not going straight to high level languages?

That is one of my main worries actually. I want to have a solid foundation and principles of how I should build something. Or is my thinking flawed?

The goals of those courses are different from the goals of building complex software. Courses are designed to teach you how a language works in both theory and practice and they generally go through a language and help you understand what parts of it do and why it does what it does.

Nearly all modern languages have developed as some response to C, and Python is also studied because it has a good reputation as a first language.

Software development is about coordinating work so that it produces a product that is reliable and also on time and under budget. This is the sort of thing you can learn, somewhat, by examining the code and work done in open source, but mostly you learn it by working in a (good) software development office. It's important, but not something that is easy to teach while you are also learning how computer languages work.