From: Friedrich Dominicus Date: 2006-02-25T01:58:37+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby as First Language "Robert Klemme" writes: > woodyee wrote: >> Hi! I'm interested in getting opinions on Ruby as a first language. >> For example, how it compares to python/perl/basic/etc as a first >> language. My goals are to learn the basics of a language, then delve >> into network programming, and then learn how to interact with the >> operating system programaticallly. Will Ruby help me achieve this >> goal? Will Ruby enable me to transition to other languages (ex., >> C/Assembly/etc)? Thanks in advance! > > Ruby vs. Perl: much cleaner syntax and less typing. > > Ruby vs. Basic: although there might be Basic dialects around that have > evolved from the ridiculous line number + GOTO I'd rather not consider it. > > Ruby vs. Python: can't comment on that. > > Ruby takes away a lot of the nifty details that you would have to deal > with in C or C++ (memory management etc.) or Perl (how many $'s do I need > here?). OTOH there is no *direct* access to system libs (as from C for > example). For that you would have to write a C extension. Still, I think > to initially learn to develop software Ruby is a pretty good choice. > > Kind regards > > robert I don't think the vs stuff is needed. Ruby is a nice language by many means, and the others are nice also. Of course the programmers here have decided pro Ruby. Ruby is a good choice if you like OO, but for that you can use Smalltalk also. Unfortunatly the Self stuff has not get the attention it deserves, but that's things are. If you are not used to OO, it is a task to get into it. My experiences with OO start while learning Eiffel (now around 12 years or so ago). I was a enthusiastic Eiffel programmer but the whole stuff around a few actors have taken away all the fun. Now if you are a fan of static types language which are good for building scyscrapers, you still can go for Eiffel. But if you learn other approaches like e.g functional programming (very much advised to learn it whther you use it or not) you fell way to much tighthen to imperative/object-oriented stuff in Eiffel. An eye opener was Haskell, Ocaml, Erlang and last but not least the Lisp family. I like Ruby for my scripting purposes, but I write a few liners of ugly shell code. It's nice that ruby offers quite a lot in regard to functional programming, also the most software I've seen written in Ruby uses the imperative / object-oriented programming style. I found most of the code quite readable and "understandable" the learning curve is not steep (if you know OO of course) Regards Friedrich -- Please remove just-for-news- to reply via e-mail.