From: Robert Klemme <bob.news@...>
Date: 2005-11-23T21:37:25+09:00
Subject: Re: teaching ruby as cs intro?

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).

I'd delete that ^^^ sentence as it somewhat contradicts your statement
about clean syntax etc. :-)

> 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

Sounds good all in all.  I'd put the main focus on the clean OO and
syntax, rich std lib and wide range of programming paradigms covered as
these are the items that best support chosing ruby as learning language
IMHO.

Let us know the outcome!

Kind regards

    robert