Falling in love with Ruby
So, I’m completely in love with the Ruby programming language. I started to learn it about a year ago when the buzz for Rails was really starting to get loud and have done probably 75% of my personal programming in the language in the past 6 months. I still write practically exclusively in C# for work (which isn’t so bad really) but I do find myself less enamored with the language since I’ve learned Ruby.
The biggest reason for this is pretty simple. More than anything else, writing Ruby programs is more fun than writing in most other languages I’ve found. But it wasn’t love at first sight, few things are. Learning the language was easy enough, but learning to program in it the way you should (to really embrace the Ruby philosophy) took me a little while.
That also has a pretty simple reason, and it’s has almost nothing to do with Ruby itself. Working with all that C# you get very used to being very formal and strict about everything. You have all sorts of design meetings and guidelines and standards. That’s the only way you can make code that’s deliverable and maintainable and able to be documented and all that. And, that’s actually OK by me. I’m pretty into perfection and so getting down into that nitty gritty doesn’t bother me too much. So I got used to it.
Now, that’s not to say you can’t be precise and stick to standards and be anal with Ruby, because you can. But, the language is designed in a way where you’re most productive if you just “let it flow.” That’s the best way I can say it really. The main proponents of Ruby weren’t lying where they said it is a language that was designed with the programmer in mind.
Since I’ve re-awoken that part of me that had somehow forgotten to just “let it flow” I’ve been developing a lot more and have been a lot more productive. It also forced me to examine some of the habits I had when developing in other C style languages and realize, “you know, there’s no real reason that I have to do it that way.” And I think I’m better because of it.
