I just finished up Ruby – Day 3 from Seven Languages in Seven Weeks.  I can’t say I fully grok everything that I’ve done, but Ruby seemed fairly straight forward and in many ways similar to Python (though I have noticed Rubyites tend to be able to on a moments notice generate a long list of why it’s better than Python).

I had originally wanted to learn Ruby because I’ve been trying to re-launch my website and blog using nanoc, which is written in Ruby.  While strictly speaking it isn’t necessary to understand Ruby to use nanoc, any type of customization will require writing and manipulating Ruby code, and knowing me, I’ll want to do some customization.  I feel I understand enough of the syntax and a bit of the power-features of the language to get by understanding the bits of nanoc that I might be customizing, but I definitely have a long way to go with a lot more experimenting before I could say I’m comfortable with the language, but I suppose that’s to be expected!

Maybe it’s due to my very preliminary understanding of it, but I feel kind of let down by all the hype.  Perhaps it’s because it’s an OOP language, and so in many respects similar to Python, or even C++ in terms of how the code is structured, but I didn’t really get terribly excited about it as I was working with it.  I’m really looking forward to the other languages in the book and breaking away from OOP thinking.  From the descriptions, it sounds like each of them encourage a different type of thinking when writing code and designing a program.  Even though it’s last on the list, I I’m going to start the Haskell section next, mainly because I’ve already dabbled in it a bit, and I’d like to write up an assignment using a functional programming language, so I should probably learn enough of one to be able to actually write up a solution!