Monday 29 September 2008

I've fell in love...

...with Ruby.

Yeah, I am neither proffesional nor studied programmer, but I like coding from time to time. I've learnt Pascal (Turbo Pascal implementation) and Delphi during my basic and high school studies and FreePascal and basics of C in my first year on University (we had a Programming for Physics classes). Then I switched to C completely as I started working on gtk-nodoka-engine and I love it, and even though I have basics in C++, I like C more. But lately a rather unexpected competitor came into my view - Ruby. Up until recently it was a hit-and-miss and frantical searching in documentation to get things done (I decided to make the echo-artist scripts in Ruby, since the code I based it off was already in Ruby), but now I decided to learn it properly and the more I read, the more I like it.

It's really a great programming language and truly Object Oriented one (unlike various "object oriented" hacks/workarounds/whatever of C, like Objective C or C++). You know it's great that everything is an object so you can easily do things like
100.times {puts 'I like Ruby!'} (prints "I like Ruby!" hundred times),
['Peter', 'Martin', 'Nicu'].each {|name| puts "Hi #{name}!"} (welcomes Peter, Martin and Nicu) or
1.upto(200) {|num| printf "Try #%05d\n", num} (if you know C you'll get what this does).
And I am just at the begining still...

And one usual rant at the end. Again I updated xulrunner and again epiphany started eating CPU... So I am again temporarily using WebKit backend in ephy... I hope WebKit-gtk gets the still missing functionality I need implemented soon so that I could get rid of gecko in my browser for good... (Yes, I've already gave up on gecko, but for WebKit I try my best with filling bugs I notice and RFEs). And of course, this post was also written from ephy with webkit backend.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Martin!

If you love Ruby you'll be shocked by Smalltalk ;)
Seriously, if you can please give it a try, it's a REAL object system and you can do really crazy things like modifying an application at run time.

There's a lot of documentation on the net, including some free books at: http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html (the one I recommend you it's called "Smalltalk, Objects and Design").

Best regards,

Federico Omoto

nicu said...

So Martin, I guess you like Ruby...

On, and this was one more (unintended) benefit of the One Canvas Workflow.