From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2008-05-30T00:39:35+09:00
Subject: Re: Should I Learn Ruby as a First Language?

On Thursday 29 May 2008 06:54:54 MRH wrote:
> Hi David,
> 
> Thank you for your post.
> 
> > Depends what you want to do, and how far you want to go.
> 
> I want to program for myself, for clients, and contribute to FOSS
> projects, and take it all as far as I can.

Still depends -- for example, if you just want to be able to contribute to the 
most FOSS possible, learn C. The vast majority of FOSS projects are in C, 
among them some of the better known. It might be nice to know some value of P 
in a "LAMP stack" -- Perl/PHP/Python/Ruby -- but pretty much the entire rest 
of the stack will be written in C. Maybe a bit of shell scripts, but the 
shell itself is written in C.

If, on the other hand, you want to write brand new apps, from the ground up -- 
or you want to interface with all these existing apps, but not actually patch 
them -- then Ruby is as good a choice as any.

But these don't matter as much, since you've indicated a more academic 
curiosity -- you'll probably learn both anyway, and more.

> I hear you, I am mostly interested in web applications, yet also want
> to explore desktop applications for Mac OS X . . . and the more I read
> about Lisp, the more interesting it becomes . . .

I suspect that Ruby has more LISPisms than Python. Either would be good for 
GUI OS X apps and web apps.