Every single day, we’re bombarded by commercials telling us that a particular product will make us happy. Just buy these jeans, drink this soft drink, or drive this car and you’ll be happy and attractive. We can’t promise it will increase your sex appeal, but we have found something that will make you happy about writing code again. It’s a new programming language from Japan called “Ruby.”
Using Ruby will make you feel good about programming. People smile during hands-on Ruby tutorials when they’re working on the exercises. They even write to the mailing list just to say that Ruby makes them feel good.
Why is this? There are plenty of technical things to like about the language. Ruby is concise, with a simple syntax and grammar. It’s both high-level and close to the machine, so you can get a lot done with a remarkably short program. It’s totally object-oriented; everything is an object (or can be made into an object), and it was designed that way from the start. Like Smalltalk, Ruby’s variables are not typed, but the language is strongly typed. It’s dynamic; you can extend all classes, including the built-in ones, at runtime, and its eval() method lets you incrementally compile code into a running program. Its garbage collection makes coding less of a crapshoot, and the simple yet flexible exception scheme makes it easy to structure your error handling. And when you…
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