From: Francois Paul <francois@...>
Date: 2005-11-23T19:03:15+09:00
Subject: Re: teaching ruby as cs intro?

Hi Mike,
maybe you could give them a small example of the concise nature of ruby 
by writing a small java program and then rewriting it in ruby?

for example:

On 10/11/05, Florian Frank <flori@nixe.ping.de> wrote:

>> junk5@microserf.org.uk wrote:
>  
>
>> If you start to learn programming, it's important to go step by step
>> from easy concepts to more complicated concepts. In Ruby this can be
>> done like this:
>>
>> puts "Hello, world"
>>   ^-- command  ^--- string
>>
>> Easy: "puts" is a command that puts a string out on your console.
>>
>> Only later you tell your student about classes, methods and the whole
>> OOP-Zoo.
>>
>> Now look at Java:
>>
>> public class Hello {
>>          public static void main(String[] args) {
>>                  System.out.println("Hello, world\n");
>>          }
>> }
>>
>> You have to explain a dozen foreign, arcane and (at least to the
>> beginner) useless concepts, only to output a string on the console.
>>
>> Next step in Ruby:
>>
>> name = gets
>> puts "Hello, " + name
>>
>> "gets" gets a string input line from your console, which is assigned to
>> the variable name. Then the string "Hello, " is appended to the string
>> referenced by name with the "+" operator, and the resulting string is
>> put out on the console with the old "puts" command.
>>
>> Now compare this to Java:
>>
>> import java.io.*;
>>
>> public class Hello2 {
>>      public static void main(String[] args) {
>>          InputStreamReader isr = new InputStreamReader(System.in);
>>          BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(isr);
>>          String name = null;
>>          try {
>>              if ((name = reader.readLine()) != null) {
>>                  System.out.println("Hello, " + name + "\n");
>>              }
>>          } catch (IOException e) {
>>              System.err.println("Caught: " + e);
>>          }
>>      }
>> }
>




Mike Schwab wrote:

> My school teaches intro to programming with Java or C#, intro to cs  
> with Scheme, then requires two semesters of C to scare us into being  
> good and careful.  Learning about Ruby has been a way nicer  
> experience and I think it would draw more kids into the major if it  
> was taught early on.  What do you think?
>
> Here's my draft of what I'm sending to the Teaching and Learning  
> committee.  Suggestions welcome.
>
> Professors,
>
> Ruby is a very powerful, very concise and readable, and I think very  
> easy to learn language.  You should seriously consider teaching this  
> language at an introductory level.  It combines the flexibility of  
> scripting languages, the modularity of object-oriented languages, and  
> the recursive/iterative chaining of functional languages.  Perhaps it  
> would be overwhelming to present all these capabilities to young  
> students too quickly; nonetheless there's enough documentation on the  
> web that motivated students could move beyond the problem sets and  
> start writing their own useful apps within their first semester (Ruby  
> is also rather addictive).  There is an interactive shell (invoked  by 
> /$ruby eval.rb ), so students would get instant feedback during  their 
> initial debugging that would really help them quickly  straighten out 
> their mistakes.
>
> While it doesn't run fast enough for every application, Ruby saves  
> quite a bit of programmer time, and it's concise nature makes it  
> simple to maintain.  The community is very agile and develops  
> programs at a surprising pace.  Often these releases seem to have a  
> very modular nature that allows them to be incorporated usefully into  
> other apps, so in other words, the time-saving capabilities of using  
> Ruby are great and increasing.  I cannot wait to see what libraries,  
> software, and websites are available this time next year (hopefully  
> by then I'll be able to understand all their code too). Along with  
> lessons on theory, syntax and conventions, I suggest that you offer  
> some lessons on checking documentation and wikis, and installing and  
> using libraries.  In fact, many wiki pages might be well-written  
> enough that you could lecture right off of them, reducing the burden  
> of preparation (also, if the lecturer ran across a question she  
> couldn't answer, she could post to the Google group comp.lang.ruby  
> and probably have an answer before the lecture was over).  This  
> combination of simplicity, facility, documentation, and human  
> explanation is something Yale students could use to great benefit in  
> the coming decades, whether or not they take additional CS classes.
>
> I encourage you to investigate Ruby for your own uses - you may find  
> that it plays very nicely with the codebase you already have.  I hope  
> you and your students will find it as useful as I have.
>
> -Mike
>
> http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RubyIdioms <- a taste of Ruby
> http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/ <- a free textbook  
> (newer version available)
> http://www.ruby-forum.com <- discussion of real-world uses
> http://www.zenspider.com/Languages/Ruby/index.html <- papers from  
> Ruby conferences
>
>