From: ilan berci Date: 2006-06-13T00:38:30+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby for Highschoolers? Concerning the ide vs command line: nothing beats irb as a learning tool. It's quick, easy, immediate, tangible, heavenly! I don't work for or am in any way associated with Thomas/Hunt and/or the pickaxe books but if I was tasked with designing a course, I would follow their example. They mentioned in their first book of the difficulties of putting the book together as they initially wanted to start with OO but then later realized that it would have to be addressed only after introducing 'some' language constructs or the OO concepts would have no footing. That book was one of the best books ever written in the software field and has a great juke box rolling example that you can base your whole course around. All basic coding constructs can be expressed as easily in Ruby as any other language. So what if it has many built in features? I remember learning all about arrays with my trusty Borland 3.0 c++ compiler and then being horrified to see that they had an Array class and thinking that there would never be a need for simple arrays.. :) Finally OO IS REAL LIFE, the whole world is made of components interacting with other components. It is impossible to think of a component that we use daily that doesn't have aspects of polymorphism or encapsulation. We start out at the age of 3 knowing what an object is only to unlearn it when we start to code!? Anyways, thankfully, I think the days of OO being some kind of mystery are finally behind us. This may seem contradictory from what I stated above but isn't! :) IDE's are actually confusing to the user as they have to jump 2 steps instead of one. They may be intimidatd from learning the IDE and that would deter them from learning the language. I work with Eclipse for my day job and after years of twiddling with it, have it perfectly tweaked for my needs, but anyone coming to my office would have a problem being productive with it. Actually, come to think of it, I don't think there is a sigle member on my team that has a simillar development environment. p.s. If I was to use Ruby in a teaching course, I would explicitly express the method signature notation to ease the learning curve. with love, ilan -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.