From: Tim Hunter <TimHunter@...>
Date: 2008-05-29T07:58:31+09:00
Subject: Re: Should I Learn Ruby as a First Language?

Bill Kelly wrote:
> Personally I find it extremely useful to be fluent in the
> language that Ruby is written in.  Ruby would be a lot less
> useful to me if I weren't able to write my own ruby extension modules. . 
> . . Which requires a knowledge of C,
> if one is using Matz' ruby.  (Obviously if I were using
> JRuby, knowledge of C wouldn't be anywhere near as relevant.)
> 
> I'm not convinced someone should learn C *before* ruby,
> however I find C to be an extremely vaulable language to know.

+1. I read this quote from somebody smart: "C is the atmosphere in which 
we live."

Although I learned (and earned my living with) assembly language many 
years ago, I don't think it's particularly necessary to learn it now 
unless you're working in a very specialized area, like compilers, 
graphics drivers, etc. But C is still hugely popular and widely used and 
having it in your toolchest will be useful for many years to come.

However, even though C is a small language (compared to Java or C++) I 
think it's harder to learn than Ruby, and learning it will be more 
frustrating since it takes so much more code to get results and it's so 
easy to make mistakes that are really, really hard to fix. I've been 
doing it for 25 years now and I still spend more of my time finding and 
fixing bugs than I do writing code.

-- 
RMagick: http://rmagick.rubyforge.org/
RMagick 2: http://rmagick.rubyforge.org/rmagick2.html