From: terryowen Date: 2011-04-16T03:45:35+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby for beginners (was: Re: Hello) On Apr 12, 8:30 pm, Vincent Manis wrote: > OK, so here's another kick at the can. > > 1. I would be willing to draft a `Totally New To Programming' page for ruby-lang.org, if there's sentiment that this would be a useful thing. > > 2. tryruby.org is very meritorious, but doesn't really replace having Ruby on one's own machine. It gives you the experience of interacting with Ruby, but doesn't show you how to transfer that to writing and running programs on your own machine. > > 3. An IDE for beginners should be relatively limited, with relatively few dingbats and gizmos to confuse. It should focus on offering basic editing facilities, along with the ability to write and run programs. Beginners don't need API documentation, though a Ruby reference card would probably be handy. > Such an IDE should be something that can be included with the installers, and depend upon nothing else. Of course the model here is Python's IDLE, which IMHO isn't suitable for serious programming, but on the other hand is very useful for getting started with Python. I used to use it in all my Python courses, even with programmers who presumably knew other editors well. > > And that suggests using Tk as the GUI, because that's included in every Ruby distribution. So the one-click installers could thus incorporate a basic IDE that was at least useful enough to get people started. > > Is there any sentiment that this would all be a worthwhile effort? > > -- vincent Ruby is on my list of things to learn and every once in a while I go check things out. I have a programming background, of sorts (midrange - think RPG/Cobol, Rexx, VB and Perl) although not recent. Most of my work is done on Windows and I think the closest I came to actually learning Ruby was when I downloaded Shoes. I liked playing with the sample programs and thought the environment was nice, if quirky and hard to modify. But I know some programming and I just thought there were too many pieces to deal with. Especially gems that should have been standard. (IMO and YMMV) I do like Scite as an editor, though. I don't remember if it's Autohotkey or Autoit that comes with it installed and also has a help file with runnable scripts but it's one of the best approaches I've seen. I might still be using it if all the virus checkers didn't go nuts with the resulting programs. What I would like to see is a true portable version of Ruby, packaged with a way to make your own executables (or some sort of self- contained way to distribute programs) without too much trouble. I think if I would have had that, I would have stuck with it long enough to actually learn it. (If you look at the newbie questions on any scripting language, creating an executable is usually one of the top ten FAQs.) I play around with Portable Python on my flash drive once in a while. I don't like it that much but I do think learning either Python or Ruby would be a good thing. Terry (back to lurking) p.s. the worst thing about Shoes was the Tricky Blocks section right after the Intro. There has to be a better way to do that. I usually bail right there and go back to playing with the sample apps.