From: Mark Wilson <mwilson13@...>
Date: 2002-12-03T04:16:41+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Book for People Who Aren't (Yet) Programmers

On Monday, December 2, 2002, at 01:09 PM, Tim Hunter wrote:

> Wait a minute. There's a second drawback. People who learn Ruby first 
> might start to expect other programming languages to be as expressive 
> and powerful :-)

I don't plan on spending much time learning any language other than 
Ruby. Ruby is so wonderful because it puts real power in the hands of a 
beginning programmer in a very immediate way.

For the past several years, while working full-time in another field, I 
wanted to find a powerful and accessible programming language to create 
tools that I want to have in my work. But until Ruby, it just took too 
long to learn how to write a program that did something useful. I have 
done "Hello, world!" and fahrenheit-celsius conversion programs in lots 
of programming languages.

I bought a C++ book but found it almost impossible to read (I didn't 
really grasp the concept of an array because the first thing they told 
you to do was to set the size of the array rather than telling you what 
it was -- I thought an array was another word for a square shaped 
matrix).

The Java book I bought was almost as bad (I've mostly blocked it out, 
but I have a vague recollection of reading that I had to choose public, 
private or protected right away).

Applescript seemed promising (just stitch together the functionality of 
all these desktop applications), but it was difficult for me to do 
anything with it other than open applications.

I briefly looked at PHP, which is very messy.

In spite of the above, I didn't think I was stupid (:-)) -- just too 
busy to properly learn this stuff.

And then I found Ruby. Ruby enables a person to do very productive 
things with truly minimal overhead.  You can do complicated things with 
several hundred gigabytes of text files. You can create your own 
powerful web applications. You can create that GUI program with the 
customized features you want that no software company thinks to 
provide. You can learn object orientation, gently. I could go on . . ., 
but I'll stop.

Thank you to matz and all of the people working on and in Ruby.