From: Srijayanth Sridhar <srijayanth@...>
Date: 2008-05-29T21:21:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Should I Learn Ruby as a First Language?

My two cents worth:

Ruby is a good first language to learn if you are really really young
and you are just learning something, because ruby is designed in a way
that lets us apply regular thinking methods. If you are a child,
5.times do something makes more sense than for (i=0; ....). However,
if you are a little older and are able to grasp concepts, then you
might be better off learning C.

One reason C is advantageous is it forces you to learn algorithms and
the inner working of "methods" in ruby for instance. It is entirely
possible for a person who has only learned ruby to never bother about
how a sort is implemented. This may or may not matter to you in the
end, but learning C, as someone else said earlier, really makes you
appreciate Ruby, Java etc. Also, going from Ruby to C might be hard
because it might seem like you are always writing code for tasks that
are so trivial in Ruby. So I suggest you learn C first.

Hope that helps.

Jayanth