Learning Ruby

Recently, I decided to learn Ruby, the programming language du jour of Internet startups.

The main reason was an essay in The Thoughtworks Anthology, a collection of essays about software development from some of my field's luminaries. The essay argued for polyglot programming, especially since the Java Virtual Machine enjoys wide distribution; a mature, scalable implementation; and a number of languages that compile down to Java bytecode. It showed a typical "isBlank" method in Java and an implementation in Ruby (in particular, JRuby) that was one-third the length and much more readable. The end result: code that's easier to maintain overall.

There were a few other reasons. If I'm laid off, Ruby knowledge would be a good resume item. I'm also drawn to the language's "Behavior Driven Development" testing tools Cucumber and RSpec, which a co-worker showed me. But the Thoughtworks essay was the catalyst.

I bought the "pickaxe" book and dug in.

As I've said before, I have a standard programming project I assign myself when I'm learning a new language: a solver for various types of word puzzles that you'd find in the monthly publication of the National Puzzlers' League. By the end of writing it, I have a good sense of the language's syntax, I've dug into the established class library a bit, and I've even learned something about performance: The dictionary I use is 838,000 lines, which means that I often have to optimize the code that runs in the loop over those lines.

I got my program up and running pretty quickly, and it's easy to see why people like Ruby. Even complicated tasks come together in some form pretty quickly in a much less verbose form than they would in, say, Java. I like that the language includes mixins, a way to fake multiple inheritance, and I like that you can add behavior to an existing class (which you can also do in Objective-C via categories) without subclassing it. I added a method to the String class with no effort.

And, though I haven't tried this yet, Ruby can plug in to the Open Scripting Architecture (do they still call it that?) on Mac OS X so you can control your applications via a Ruby script. At this stage in my life, I'd prefer writing a Ruby script to writing something in AppleScript.

Next, I'll try and put up a simple Ruby on Rails app. I haven't fully embraced Ruby as the one true path, but it's definitely a worthwhile addition to your programming toolkit.