There's no place like $HOME

Posted May 28, 2005 at 04:10 EDT under technology. Updated June 3, 2005 at 10:21 EDT.

From the click-your-heels-three-times dept.:

One of the tenets held by the Pragmatic Programmers folks is to learn a new computer language a year.

While I'm certainly not maintaining that particular schedule, I enjoy poking around with new technology a lot. My job (as a maintenance coder) also gives me the chance to learn new tools pretty regularly. I mean, as much as I disparage COBOL, the fact is that I learned a whole lot implementing a simple COBOL application.

There is a certain satisfaction in knowing that something you designed and implemented not only provides a pre-sales feature checkbox, but is also an actual deal-maker for some customers. The fact that I can learn a new language enough to ship product in a few months tells me I might be in the right business.

Anyway, I've been looking around for a new language to latch onto. It has to be a language I will actually use; one that fills a niche that I need it to. A new co-worker (who, coincidentally, is also quite familar with Pragmatic Programming) mentioned that I might want to look at Ruby. His approach was that it was a very complete object-oriented language, not unlike Smalltalk.

Since I know less than nothing about Smalltalk (other than it's relationship to Objective-C) this doesn't mean a whole lot to me. However, Ruby looks very promising; at least from the description in the ruby man page:

If you want a language for easy object-oriented programming, or you don't like the Perl ugliness, or you do like the concept of LISP, but don't like too much parentheses, Ruby may be the language of your choice.

Anybody who can admit that Perl is ugly deserves a little of my time.

The primary reason Forth is still a favourite computer language of mine is because I learned the language from this clever book. It was like learning embedded systems programming from Dr Seuss.

Today, I stumbled upon this freaking hilarious Ruby book.

Seriously. I laughed until I cried.

clvrmnky@swizzle:~ # ruby --version
ruby 1.8.2 (2004-12-25) [powerpc-darwin8.0]
clvrmnky@swizzle:~ # cat HelloWorld.ruby 
print "Hello World!\n"
puts "Hello World!"
$stdout << "Hello World!\n"
printf("Hello World!\n")
p "Hello World!"
clvrmnky@swizzle:~ # ruby < HelloWorld.ruby 
Hello World!
Hello World!
Hello World!
Hello World!
"Hello World!"
clvrmnky@swizzle:~ #