Teach Yourself Ruby (TYR): Days 1 & 2
In the interest of disclosure, I have to admit that I went up to about
Day 5 in TYR a few months ago before being pulled away by a variety of
distractions. So Day 1 & 2 were'nt much of a surprise. Of course
there was the usual Hello World sample. I don't remember exactly where
this example originated, but I think it is pretty amusing that it is
the canonical first example to be used when learning new languages. As
if all the years of labor and innovation that went into programming
languages were just for the purpose of finding unique ways to force the
computer to acknowledge our existence. Really the only useful indicator
to come out of the Hello World example is that if a language's Hello
World program takes more than a few lines to explain and to write, you
probably should not use that language for anything involving text.
That rant aside, mostly I am looking for differences from what I am
used to, in this case C#, Java and to a lesser extent C. From a very
high level viewpoint, Ruby is not strongly typed, and it is
interpreted, not compiled. These are some big obvious language design
differences from C# and Java. Ruby is however object-oriented, so it is
not totally different from C# and Java. From an abstract prespective
this is all interesting and the arguments over strong vs. loose typing
or interpreted vs. compiled are usually loud, contentious and
never-ending. I don't expect to solve these arguments or add more fuel
to the fire; rather I am just interested to see what the practical or
pragmattic implications of these differences are. After only 2
chapters, that is hard to tell.