Alexey said:
How was it? "I wrote in machine code by directly manipulating inodes
with magnets"
I was being semi-facetious; I believe that nubies new to programming may
have an edge over life-long coder nubies, depending, of course, on a
bazillion factors.
Martin Fowler has an entry on his bliki (Ruby-powered, I believe) about
closures. He gives examples in Ruby, and points out that some languages
have almost-but-not-really closures, leading one to
almost-but-not-really use them.
People for whom closures are an alien concept, even if they've years of
programming experience, may have a harder time getting into a Ruby mind
set if they've become overly accustomed to solving problems or writing
code a particular way.
I think it's the sort of thing that turns up when folks accomplished in
VB|Java|C try out Ruby, and find that Ruby is not as good as VB|Java|C
for writing VB|Java|C.
When working with nubies, one has to deal both with explaining how to
accomplish task X, and then showing the Ruby Way to accomplish task X.
Years of procedural, statically-typed programming can (for some people)
get in the way of the latter.
(I'm guessing that it will be mostly "old hands" who'll be asking how to
add static typing once they learn the basic Ruby syntax.)
James
