Who's a newbie?

[BobJ]

(Note - I'll fix the margins before I post again)
Like many who post here I am new to ruby but not new to programming.
Also
like many - most, actually - I'm more enthusiastic about the language
than I
have been about any language since Basic first raised its head. Why?
Simply put ruby is a programmer's language, not just a programming
language.
Programmers know how to program so they don't want their new reference
guide
to try to teach them what a variable is or why GOTO is bad stuff. If
you
note the biographical snippets that come along with postings to this
group then you
notice that in most cases "newbie" means mew to ruby - not new to
programming. Is ruby suitable for teaching programming to genuine
newbies?
I think so because you can use ruby as if it were an old fashioned
procedural language then introduce the concepts of OOP when the student
has
enough programming background to absorb the concepts.
There is another, dying paradigm from the 1970s that has a lot in
common
with ruby. It has gone by many names but is most commonly called
"Pick" or
Multivalue. Its main claim to fame was the speed with which a good
programmer could produce a useful system. Its main problem was similar
to a
problem that ruby will encounter when it tries to muscle into the "main

stream". It does not fit any accepted theory and it resists formal
proof of
completeness or integrity or whatever you wish to call such a useless
proof.
With Pick we produced elegant prototypes and called them production
systems.
We can do the same with ruby. The biggest culprit is also the biggest
benefit to the programmer - loose typing. The second culprit is a
little
harder to see at first - the ability to reference a variable that is
part of
something that has gone out of scope. In simple terms, ruby and Pick
depend
on the programmer to know his business rather than some elegant but
useless
proof of referential integrity. Bottom line is I like it, I'll use it,
but I don't think that it is any
threat to Java or VB. But I wish.
BobJ

 

[David Vallner]

BobJ wrote a lot of spam.

-1, Rant

What was the point in one sentence, preferrably written in daytime with
less caffeine in the bloodstream?

David Vallner

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

(Note - I'll fix the margins before I post again)
Like many who post here I am new to ruby but not new to programming.
Also
like many - most, actually - I'm more enthusiastic about the language
than I
have been about any language since Basic first raised its head.

The original BASIC from Dartmouth was an intentionally limited dialect
of FORTRAN designed to introduce programming concepts to non-programmers
at an undergraduate level. While it has evolved into a usable
programming language in a couple of forms (see below) its original form
was totally unsuitable for use in professional settings. Despite that
fact, it was used as such.

Is ruby suitable for teaching programming to genuine
newbies?
I think so because you can use ruby as if it were an old fashioned
procedural language then introduce the concepts of OOP when the student
has
enough programming background to absorb the concepts.

I disagree. If you're going to teach Ruby as a first language, teach the
concepts first -- what is a class, what is an object, how does
object-oriented programming organize the world of data and programs, how
does one think in terms of objects, etc. Ruby is an object-oriented
language, and there's nothing in the whole object-oriented paradigm
that's "too deep" for a beginning programmer.

There is another, dying paradigm from the 1970s that has a lot in
common
with ruby. It has gone by many names but is most commonly called
"Pick" or
Multivalue. Its main claim to fame was the speed with which a good
programmer could produce a useful system.

PICK and its variants are far from dying. There are even open-source
PICK emulations available now! As I noted above, the original BASIC was
not usable for professional programming. PICK BASIC, on the other hand,
is a well-crafted professional programming language and fits the PICK
operating system/database well.

I came to PICK after many years as a UNIX programmer, so the concepts
were somewhat strange. But I don't see your analogy between PICK and
Ruby at all. PICK is an OS integrated with a multivalue database and a
full-featured dialect of BASIC. Ruby is an object-oriented language that
can run on most operating systems and integrate with most databases.