Alexey Verkhovsky wrote:
> By the way, yours truly is not exactly a rookie, been programming since
> mid 80s.
In Ruby ?
How was it? "I wrote in machine code by directly manipulating inodes
with magnets"
Anyway, if anything in http://rubyforge.org/projects/test-report scares
anyone, I'd be happy to learn about it. 
Alex
On Thu, 2004-09-09 at 15:53, James Britt wrote:
Alexey Verkhovsky wrote:
Alexey Verkhovsky wrote:
By the way, yours truly is not exactly a rookie, been programming since
mid 80s.In Ruby ?
How was it? "I wrote in machine code by directly manipulating inodes
with magnets"
I was being semi-facetious; I believe that nubies new to programming may have an edge over life-long coder nubies, depending, of course, on a bazillion factors.
Martin Fowler has an entry on his bliki (Ruby-powered, I believe) about closures. He gives examples in Ruby, and points out that some languages have almost-but-not-really closures, leading one to almost-but-not-really use them.
People for whom closures are an alien concept, even if they've years of programming experience, may have a harder time getting into a Ruby mind set if they've become overly accustomed to solving problems or writing code a particular way.
I think it's the sort of thing that turns up when folks accomplished in VB>Java>C try out Ruby, and find that Ruby is not as good as VB|Java|C for writing VB|Java|C.
When working with nubies, one has to deal both with explaining how to accomplish task X, and then showing the Ruby Way to accomplish task X.
Years of procedural, statically-typed programming can (for some people) get in the way of the latter.
(I'm guessing that it will be mostly "old hands" who'll be asking how to add static typing once they learn the basic Ruby syntax.)
James
On Thu, 2004-09-09 at 15:53, James Britt wrote: