Building simplicidade.org: notes, projects, and occasional rants

Learning Ruby

I needed something new to do, to learn, and I decided to learn a new language. That was 2 months ago more or less.

I though about learning OCaml or Haskell but I don’t have the correct mental model to learn something like that just now. So I went with something easy, given my background.

I picked up Programming Ruby a month or so ago, and I just finished my first reading of it. I must say that I was very impressed. The language is very clean, very simple and seems extremely powerful.

I was browsing some Ruby sites and I went to Ruby on Rails website. I had heard about it from several places, the latest on was Tada lists.

Let me put it this way: if you want to get hooked, download this 47Mb video and watch the full 30 minutes of it. It’s something short of a revelation.

I’ve been a perl programmer the last 13 or 14 years, but this small video made a small place for Ruby in my toolbox. will see how this small place grows in the next months. Now, I must find a small project to try Ruby on Rails…