From: gabriele renzi <surrender_it@...>
Date: 2005-07-19T19:10:55+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby/Rails as a starter language?

Navindra Umanee ha scritto:
> James Britt <james_b@neurogami.com> wrote:
> 
>>OO is a fairly straightforward concept.  It gets messy with different 
>>implementations; Ruby's is quite clean.  People are better off going 
>>straight to OO than trying to creep up on it via clumsy "newbie" 
>>alternatives.
> 
> 
> Java, at least old Java, or Python would probably be an easier
> introduction to OO.

python is ok. I won't say that metaclass hackery, multiple inheritance 
and __mro__, the cooperative super() class, descriptors and so on are 
easy, but a noob won't hit them too soon. But the same is valid for ruby.

But please no java for a beginner.
Trust me, in my university Java is uased as the language for the first 
programming class, and the standard reaction to

public class Test{
  public static void main(String args[]){
   System.out.println("hello world");
   return;
  }
}

is people running away screaming, since they're introduced to a dozen of 
concepts in a single 5 line code. This does not mean they won't learn, 
in the end, but they find it freaking hard and non-funny.

> I still find Ruby's OO to be mind-boggling with its classes are
> objects and objects are classes, class variables and class instance
> variables, virtual classes, self and so forth.  Fact is, if you really
> want to understand Ruby's object model it also helps if you go down to
> the C level implementation.[1]

maybe this is because you have always thought classes were not objects, 
I, for one, found it extremely strange when I discovered in some 
languages they are not :)
(Classes are objects even in java and python, btw ;)