From: Victor Reyes Date: 2008-08-17T22:34:01+09:00 Subject: Re: I wish to learn Ruby ,can anyone teach me??? ------=_Part_5568_9555277.1218980229708 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 2:06 AM, Patrick Li wrote: > For your first programming language, I wouldn't suggest learning Ruby. > From my experience, both learning and teaching, Java is a really > suitable beginner language. It's adequately powerful, and extremely > simple, and it comes with enough libraries for you to do a lot of work > in. > > Ruby is still new. And even though the language is quite elegant and > extremely powerful, there's lots of quirks that can be abused. > Experienced programmers naturally know what features of the language to > use sparingly and carefully. Beginners will have more difficulty. > > To sum up: I haven't encountered much that I can do with Ruby that I > wouldn't be able to do in Java. Ruby helps speed things up > tremendously... but that's given that you already know what you're > doing. > -- > Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. > > I am really not sure how, someone in their right mind, experienced in both Ruby and Java can say that Java is easier than Ruby. Although I consider myself a Ruby beginner, I also used to do a bit of Java few years back. It was not a fun language to learn or play with. Just look at the example provided by David Masover and that should tell you a bit about the two languages. I program in Ruby mainly because: 1. It's FUN...... 2. .... It's easy! 3. The supporting community is great! Try playing with IO or Socket programming in Java, then try it in Ruby.... The only aspect of Ruby with which I am not happy at all, is the lack of a "standard" and easy way to do GUI programming. JRuby try to address that shortcoming, but it actually made it a bit too complex for my taste. I have programmed in: 1. BASIC - Student 2. Fortran - Student 3. 360/370/XA (Main Frame) Assembly - Professional for 8 years 4. Lisp - Student - Graduate School. Was forced to learn it, but found it interesting later! 5. C - Curiosity 6. REXX - Professional 7. COBOL - Wanted to know what it was: %&#$%@*! - Never learned this. I dropped it as soon as I started it. 8. PASCAL - Curiosity 9. PL/1 - Professional 10. SAS - Semi-Professional 11. SQL - Curiosity 12. Prolog - Curiosity - Never learned this 13. APL - Curiosity - Never learned this 14. JAVA - Curiosity 15. Korn Shell - Professional - UNIX Administration 16. Perl - Professional - UNIX Administration 17. Ruby - 4FUN and Professional for UNIX SYSADMIN. I really think this will be my last programming language. I'm getting too old anyway! ....and I find Ruby to be one of the must fun language to learn! Bottom line, Ruby should be everyone's first programming language! Victor ------=_Part_5568_9555277.1218980229708--