Diving into Ruby

Posted on May 20, 2006
Filed Under /dev/code/, /dev/null/ | 235 views |

For fun and profit I’ve been spending today learning Ruby. A day and already I’m digging around in lambda functions and introspection. Which would be impressive in other contexts and tantamount to bragging “I’ma genious!” otherwise, except that I can’t accept the credit - thus far it’s all Ruby. Twelve hours in and this is without a doubt the easiest language I’ve ever tried to learn (Perl: bite me, PHP: yes dear, Obj-C: we’ll speak again when you get proper garbage collection).

It’s the silly little things like everything being an object that makes it so:

Time.methods.sort()

Ta-da, all the methods of the Time class. And this:

Both exclamation marks and question marks may be used in method names

Crazy.

I don’t yet much like def...end. Braces seem faster/easier/cleaner to me but I’m just nit-picking. Let the fun continue.

Comments

2 Responses to “Diving into Ruby”

  1. Scott Steinman on May 21st, 2006 2:52 am

    Objective-C is getting garbage collection in Tiger. Some of the Mac websites have reported about this.

  2. MrHappy on May 21st, 2006 1:58 pm

    Yep, and it’s something I’m really looking forward to. In my numerous nascent attempts to dig right into Obj-C I’d guess 70% of my time has been debugging memory leaks (I don’t have a C background, from what I hear Obj-C is heaven by comparison). I count down the days….

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