From: Tom Cloyd <tomcloyd@...>
Date: 2009-07-14T22:31:15+09:00
Subject: Re: Twelve rules of Ruby

David A. Black wrote:
> Hi --
>
> On Tue, 14 Jul 2009, Panu Kinnari wrote:
>
>> Scott Adams of Dilbert fame talked about learning twelve concepts of
>> something and in the progress become more knowledgeable about given
>> subject than most of the other people.
>>
>> Original blogpost here: http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/rule_of_twelve
>> And followup with actual example:
>> http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/twelve_rules_of_energy_efficient_building/ 
>>
>>
>> Question I am proposing is found in subject line, what would be The
>> Twelve Rules for Ruby.
>>
>> I am not that great programmer and one of the reasons for starting this
>> thread is to give some direction to my learning. And then to write more
>> code to actually learn.
>>
>> I am not expecting for everyone to post 12 things, but maybe few that
>> they think should be included on this kind of list.
>
> Here's half a dozen. I would say that if everyone understood these
> principles, and really stopped to think about them when puzzled by
> something that Ruby was doing, or something that wasn't working in
> their code, it would make a huge difference overall to people's
> experiences learning and using Ruby:
>
> 1. Classes are objects.
> 2. Objects don't "have" methods; they have the intelligence to resolve
>    messages by looking for methods along their class/module lookup
>    path.
> 3. Every instance variable you ever see in any Ruby program belongs to
>    whatever object "self" is at that moment, without exception. (Which
>    is one reason that understanding how "self" gets assigned is
>    absolutely vital.)
> 4. A code block is a syntactic construct, not an object. 5. Class 
> variables are not class variables, in the sense of belonging
>    to a particular class. They are class hierarchy variables. 6. 
> Inheritance (A < B) is not the same as, and not related to, nesting
>    (A::B).
>
> The first one on the list, alone, is worth the price of admission :-)
>
>
> David
>
Very interesting David. Thanks for these!

t.

-- 

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Tom Cloyd, MS MA, LMHC - Private practice Psychotherapist
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