From: Peter Szinek <peter@...>
Date: 2006-03-30T17:49:47+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Black Belt

> If somebody is sceptic about this kind of stuff, he has to try 
> pythonchallange to see how addictive it is - it really stirred up the 
> python list, everybody was looking for answers in different techniques 
> (wrt the task he solved ATM), i remember myself to even neglecting 
> normal work to swish through XML-RPC, HTTP and cookies related python 
> stuff just to get past a certain level ;-)
> 
> What do you think?
> 
> peter
> 
btw I forgot to add: I came to know a LOT of non-programmers through 
python challange - i have been mailing on a (nearly) dayly basis with 
an US (non programmer) girl (i think se was a lawyer) up to the 18th or 
something level. When she begun she did nothing about programming at 
all, after 1 week he has been posting about regexps, after 2 weeks about 
bzip2 from python, after 3 weeks cookies and HTTP, well you get the 
idea... She was really enthusiastic to learn this stuff (which is IMHO 
not typical for a non technical person) just to see the next screen... 
And she was not the only one...

My point is that this kind of stuff has a great potential to evangelize 
the language to the noob/beginner/i'll-give-it-a-try/non-programmer 
people. You can put down pickAxe because of other tasks. You can neglect 
reading ruby talk. But you will not be able do this (at least based on 
my experience, and based on others solving python challange) with 
rubychallange.com! ;-)

Ruby quiz is very cool, but such a girl i have described above would 
never had a chance to begin it.
This is of course absolutely OK: ruby quiz is intended for a different 
audience.

peter