[Courses] [Ruby] Lesson 0: Installing, References, and your first homework assignment

[Sue Stones]

Laurel Fan wrote:

> First, introduce yourself. Do you know any other programming
>
>languages?  What do you like/not like about them?  Why are you
>interested in Ruby?  What are some things you'd like to learn to do?
>  
>

G'day,

I intend to do this course, but as I am preparing for an exam next week 
I won't actually start until after then. Still I thought that I would 
give a short introduction.

I know a lot of other languages, and I suppose that you could say that 
learning new languages is a a bit of a hobby of mine. (Other people 
collect stamps).  My biggest problem is that I don't know any language 
really well.  What I like is languages that have different ways of 
thinking about them, e.g. Prolog is very different to C which is also 
very different to Java despite the similarities.  What I don't like is 
VB which seems to be a mismash of different languages, and constantly 
changing to try and copy the latest popular language.

Ruby seems to have a different way of thinking associated with it, being 
for one thing a totally Object oriented language, so that is the first 
thing that got my interest.  Also speed of development seems to be part 
of Ruby, and the promise of using Ruby on rails to develop a web 
application painlessly seems worth investigating.

I do have some applications where I may use Ruby if it seems 
appropriate, but I need to know more about it before I can make any 
decision like that!

sue