Ruby and Rails tutorial

23 Sep 2007 . tech . Comments #jaoo #ruby #rails

As I mentioned in the last post, I was in a Ruby and Rails tutorial today. If you read it, you may recall that I said that I probably didn’t need it.

Boy, was I wrong…

While I have been using ruby and rails for quite some time, it has primarily been small stuff. A script here, and a small rails app there. Not really enough to get the full grip of the power of ruby. I feel that the tutorial today really opened my eyes to some of the potential of ruby that I really did not understand before.

I’ve mentioned the meta programming in ruby before, but I haven’t really understood it. This opens up a world of possibilities. I really look forward to playing with it.

I also got to talk a little with Glenn Vanderburg in the breaks, and that was very interesting.

The main thing that this brought back to me was really how much I love Ruby as a programming language. And I haven’t really understood why I prefer ruby to for instance a language like Python. I realise now that it boils down to the differences in philosophy of the creators of the languages. The philosophy of Guido Van Rossum (creator and benevolent dictator of Python) is that there should be only one way of doing things in the language. Matz (creator of Ruby) has the opposite philosophy that more ways of doing things is a good thing in a language. This is really the key for me. I wan’t that flexibility. This is what I love about ruby.

An effect of this is that it attracts a great community, and this community is very focused on producing clear and beautiful code, which Ruby helps you do.

Thanks, Glenn, for making this clear to me.