Ruby!

So even though it isn't April yet, I decided to start learning Ruby this week, despite what I said in this post. April 1st is a Friday, and I've been feeling extremely antsy and unproductive, so starting a few days early made sense that way.

I've got a copy of Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional, and started working through it today.

First impressions: very interesting language. Definitely makes for a good breakaway from the C-derived languages. You can tell that it was developed from scratch in the 1990s and didn't have to be backwards compatible with any annoying legacy features from an older predecessor language. In fact, that was the Ruby design philosophy: take the best of what was around at the time, and create a cool new language from scratch.

I read on a forum once that Ruby is like durian - you either fall in love with it immediately, or you hate it. Maybe "immediately" was an exaggeration, because while I definitely find it really cool, I wouldn't say I love it, yet. Maybe what they meant to say was - "once you've got some decent working knowledge of it". At any rate, I'll see how I feel about it once I've thoroughly worked through the whole book.

There is one thing I do love about Ruby though: the switch statement doesn't fall through. :)