From: Jeffrey Dik Date: 2005-10-15T03:50:15+09:00 Subject: Re: my mother wants to code? Hi, I think Ruby is a fabulous choice for learning to program. Ruby makes the easy stuff easy, while also having a lot of the cooler stuff too (closures, continuation, regexs, etc). Ruby is extemely elegant, fairly simple and consistent, and expressive. I think the best way to learn to program is to do a lot of programming. Ruby will let you write powerful programs with simple programming concepts. You really don't have to know a lot to get started. Learn the more powerful stuff gradually when you need them. Besides, Ruby's community's is the coolest ;-) Save your mother from the Java torture (unknowingly (?)) inflicted by your younger brother! Spare yourself from your mother being annoyed at you when she realizes how much cooler Ruby is than Java and you just stood aside! Take action! you.teach!(:Ruby, :to => "mom") # or something like that. # Refactorings, anybody? Jeff P.S. I didn't send the first email I wrote because I just ended up gushing about how cool Ruby is. This one's not much better. Ah well. On Tue, Oct 11, 2005 at 05:20:00PM +0900, Francois Paul wrote: > Hi, > my 50 year old mother wants to learn to code. > She has no computer experience, but she is surrounded with programmers > (three sons and a husband) and she wants to be able to understand what > we are talking about. > She is also quite tired of being a math teacher and is considdering to > quit her job in favour of helping with my webdev company (doing some > mundane inhouse development). > > My little brother is busy teaching her Java but I feel Ruby is the > better (friendlier, more productive) language. However I can't seem to > find a good introduction to ruby that asumes no previous programming > experience (there are plenty available for Java). > > can anyone point me in the right direction? also if you think it is a > better idea to start programming in Java rather than Ruby, please let me > know why. > > Regards, > > Francois > >