From: ptkwt@... (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2005-07-20T02:45:55+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby/Rails as a starter language?

In article <20050719034109.B16573@cs.mcgill.ca>,
Navindra Umanee  <navindra@cs.mcgill.ca> wrote:
>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.
>
>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]
>
>Ruby is fascinating and satisfying, but I'm not entirely sure exposure
>to such an object model is entirely appropriate for a newbie...
>Although certainly much of it can be ignored at the beginning and
>introduced in steps, a newbie might be more satisfied with, say,
>Python since it would probably be easier to grasp in its entirety.
>

But isn't Ruby's object model very similar to Smalltalk's and wasnt' 
Smalltalk developed to teach programming to children?  If anything Ruby is 
more consistent.  A newbie (not having been exposed to, say Java's object 
model) might think it very natural that a class is an object.  I think 
it's just an impediment for those who have come from other languages where 
that wasn't the case.

I still think that Ruby is a very good learning language.  I've taught 
Ruby to total newbies before.  Well, one person in the class wasn't a 
total newbie: he was an old assembly programmer (the guy would even do web 
stuff in assembly).  The assembly programmer just couldn't get it, but 
most everyone else (most of whom had 0 programming experience) grasped the 
concepts (even the OO ones) pretty quickly.  I suspect that the assembly 
programmer just had too much baggage and that he was trying to understand 
Ruby through that assembly language baggage.

Phil