Time to learn Ruby (or relearn Smalltalk)

Time to learn Ruby (or relearn Smalltalk

I assure you you will not regret it. I've learned it to be able to quick prototype (because of scripting) while being able to use OO.

Please share your feelings about it.

Leonardo,

Thanks for the encouragement. I'm picking up the pickaxe book today and will try to plow through it this weekend.

As for motivation, I'm just looking for the most efficient pipe from my brain to executable x86.

Whether that's for prototyping or production code, I'm not partial - ideally I can use the same metaphor, syntax, etc. for both.

Also, I'm strongly in the Alan Kay/Smalltalk camp - messages, not objects have become the way I think. Go look at Indigo for an example :-)

DB

Don, I started playing with Ruby last year and I've found it to be a great language. One thing I found nice was the Ruby/.NET bridge that is available here:

http://www.saltypickle.com/rubydotnet/

Looking forward to hearing about your experiences with Ruby.

All IMO:

"you cannot rely on the compiler to catch trivial mistakes"

This is the one that kills these non-statically typed languages for me. I use the compiler to refactor code.

"stop writing so much code"

The problem with that one is that with a proper IDE and a statically typed language, I do less typing than with Ruby.
It takes (me) ages to code in a dynamic language, because I'm constantly having to look at the (normally poor) documentation since the IDE can't tell you method and class signatures.

Ruby is nice and concise to look at, but it's strictly for the superbrains who enjoy doing all that typing and manual refactoring, and love the edit run bang edit run bang edit run bang edit run bang edit run bang edit run bang edit run bang edit run bang edit run yay it worked code cycle.

Don,

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on Ruby and how .NET developers (or any developers, I imagine) could benefit from learning it.

Middlebrow Static Language Guy wrote:
> "you cannot rely on the compiler to catchtrivial mistakes"
> This is the one that kills these non-statically typed languages for me. I use the compiler to refactor code.

While there are many classes of errors that, say, Java or C++ compilers cannot catch, most of the refactoring-related errors, such as undecleard inst var, etc. can be caught by, say, an ordinary Smalltalk compiler. (Of course, there are some classes of errors that a Smalltalk compiler cannot catch, but the concept of refactoring came from Smalltalk, after all.)

The class of errors that can be caught by the compilers differs in one language to another, and not really related to whether the language is dynamically or statically typed.

The bottom-line is that language design spans over so many trade-offs, and the class of errors that can be deteched at compile time is not that dominant factor in todays many languages.

Just my two cents.

After having programmed in Objective C for ten years, one thing I really dislike about it is the runtime errors related to the messaging approach. I hate when I see errors like this in shipping code: "object foo does not recognize 'bar'". Call me lazy but I like for the compiler to do as much of the heavy lifting as it can i.e. static type checking is something I like.

It's 67 things actually :)

Don, have a look to seaside by Avi Bryant.

http://seaside.st/

Iam sure it will interest you...

Can any one please tell me where I can learn ruby for free? I don't know much about programming but ruby seems a good place to start since it seems both powerful and easy (an unusual combination).

A good learning programming language is visual basic 6.0

You can get a free version from the microsoft website. You can get books from your local library. Ruby is a good language but you should get some experience with a procedure oriented programming language first.

Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 is a very easy language to learn. Below is some sample code which just gets a number adds ten then displays it.

Dim intnumber as integer
intnumber = inputbox("Enter a number")
intnumber = intnumber + 10
msgbox intnumber,,"your number + 10"

See how easy it is!!

IMHO, VB is a hideous way to learn programming, unless you think that BASIC is a programming language. Sure, Billy Boy started making his first billions writing a Basic compiler, but the language was developed at Dartmouth (and first released in 1964) to show non-programmers how to do some things with a computer. LOGO, a much better language, was released in 1966 to do the same.

i programed my own operating system in ruby, its called altimit os.

I write for Linux, but have grudgingly found that VBA is actually a very good OO language. Very fast prototyping, excellent MS Office integration, excellent DB integration... I don't *want* to like it, but it really gets those quick-and-dirty user-front-end jobs done fast.

Ruby looks lik ea very nice language; spare a thought for smalltalk as well - squeak.org would be a good place to start. Once you get over the "er, it looks like a toy" first-thoughts, you should find a very mature and capable environment.

My 0.02 pesos.

B

Any significant app in ruby out there already? --DTebar