Ruby is an interesting language

Ruby Programming Language: It's got iteration methods do: select, collect, inject:into from Smalltalk and many of the global variables from Perl.

Yet it mashes them in a nice piece that is easy to digest, and one that wants you come again for more.

It's interesting I am reading and learning more Smalltalk stuff, just because I am learning more about Ruby. Neverthought I would encounter Smalltalk docs, as I am relatively new - I started my computer science education in 2000.

I sometimes wondered what made Dave Thomas so zealous about Ruby. What did he saw in it, that he decided to dedicate months of his time mastering it. After reading his PickAxe book, and I now exactly why. What I found about Ruby is that, if you learn or study it with a positive attitude, reading to learn but not criticize or how it compares with your favorite language, it gets on you. It takes you over. You are like, what the heck - dynamic, closures, mixins, all the tasty globals, gems and libraries and the community - life is finally more fun.

But if you already took the time to learn, master, program in other oftenly compared languages like Python, you will appreciate some of its beauty and easily find some of its dents and issues. You are like, huh? Ok. Now, back to work. Although some of these guys are forcefully learning to learn the current phenomenon - RoR (ruby on rails), but what many of them don't get is - RoR's heart and soul is Ruby. It exploits its power and dynamic elegance and adds architectural patterns and framework models to it, giving it a nice rich personality. But Ruby is what inspired it. Without appreciating Ruby, learning and working with RoR is just like chasing the hype.

Ruby - It's the community, stupid!