Linked by Roberto J. Dohnert on Wed 28th Jul 2004 17:23 UTC
Most of us that work in the IT industry have been around for a long time. We started out in our parents basement writing code in some BASIC environment, ussually Commodore BASIC or QBASIC. Do you remember how thrilling it was? Your first program and it was something extremely basic but the point was it worked. Some of us got hooked right away and kept trying to solve problems and added more and more pushing the capabilities of whatever language we used. As we got older the environments progressed and the programming tools progressed and got more complicated.
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Weird. I was just about to mention Ruby too...
Ruby is a great place to start, pure OO, interpretive, easy to code Apps, Web based stuff, servers and so on.
Haven't used Python, Perl, PHP and so on too much, but from what I gather, Ruby is right up there with these guys, and some would argue better in some areas. A mate here swears by PHP for web based development.
For Linux and Mac, you can run Ruby out the box.
For Cocoa dev, you'll need RubyCocoa, but this means you can use Interface Builder for UI design (very nice).
For both platforms however, Tk, Gtk (and Glade) and so on are available. Not to mention great XML / Socket / Net / text parsing and database tools (plus many many others)...
For Windows developers, you'll need something like Cygwin, but other than that there should be no problems (shame there isn't a purely native version). Not sure if there is any native windows UI support either (guess who hasn't used Ruby on Win yet)...
Again, we're talking hobbist programming here right. Ruby is not that good for low level OS coding, writing DLL's or NT Services and so on. I probably wouldn't try and write DOOM 3 with it either...
But to get a handle on how to code, OO concepts and so on Ruby is not too bad at all. I'm using it more and more at work to write apps that would normally take thousands of lines of code in no time out all. It's weird for some of us coders who have been in the game for a while to start using a scripting language for mission critical applications, but you can / should at times....
Having said all that, C / C++ / Objective-C / C# / Java and so on can be excellent hobbist tools, any language can be really, as long as you are prepared to take time to learn the tools, pretty much like any hobby really. The advantage to learning Jave or C++ etc. is that there are so many languages out there with very similar syntax, so jumping to another language isn't too hard.