What to learn next: Ruby?
The last “language” I learned was CSS, and that was a little while ago now. It’s time to learn something new, I think. I hemmed and hawed, wondering if maybe I should learn PHP, but decided against it.
I’ve heard enough about Ruby and Ruby on Rails now for me to be curious enough to try it out. It sounds like a lot of Java developers like it, which leads me to think maybe I will too. A glance at the built-in classes and modules reveals method names a little short and cryptic to my taste (though familiar to unix users, it looks like). I much prefer longer names made out of full English words. Why would you ever want to name a method “gsub” when you could just call it “replace”? Or “to_f” instead of “toFloat”? Nonetheless, it looks much better than PHP’s mess of functions, probably mostly due to the fact that ruby has modules and classes.
It looks like Rails makes getting a basic web application up and running very easy. I found the tutorial on onLamp.com very informative. I hope to actually try it out sometime soon when I get a few spare moments.
But now I’m off to orchestra!
