From: "David A. Black" <dblack@...>
Date: 2009-01-09T22:30:56+09:00
Subject: Re: How Ruby

Hi --

On Fri, 9 Jan 2009, Tom Cloyd wrote:

> Thanks Mike. I appreciated your post. I'm an awful Ruby programmer, and write 
> tightly organized, well documented procedural Ruby. I'm only now, after 
> probably 1.5 years of on and off work in the language, getting around to 
> writing classes. I really couldn't see why I'd want to, until very recently. 
> Then, thanks to some folks on this list, I "got it". I can't wait to dive in 
> to using classes, now.

Dave Thomas issued a challenge in a recent keynote address, where he
suggested that when each of us writes our next Ruby program, we try to
do it without writing any classes. It's an artificial exercise, of
course, but it keeps the focus on the objects as opposed to the class
hierarchy, which is all to the good in most cases.

When I teach the Ruby language, I actually illustrate singleton
methods before I talk about classes, because I consider the dynamism
of objects (their independence from their classes) to be a more
important foundational principle of Ruby than the fact that every
object is an instance of a class. Mind you, like everyone else I write
"class Thing" more often than "def thing.something" in my own code (I
think :-) But it's still important, in my view, to get the hang of the
fact that Ruby classes are not the center of gravity.

So it sounds like you've done it in the right order :-) Keep modules
in mind, too. They're very cool, especially when you #extend objects
with them....


David

-- 
David A. Black / Ruby Power and Light, LLC
Ruby/Rails consulting & training: http://www.rubypal.com
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