First impressions of Ruby (not Rails)

Free time has been scarce recently but I’ve slowly been working my way through this tutorial on Ruby. I figured I’d cover all the basics before jumping head first into rails.

Ruby feels like a step forward in programming compared to a step sideways when I’m learning Java. For example, Java and Ruby both have automatic memory management yet in Java there are still four different sizes of integer (byte, short, int and long). Whereas Ruby being more human than machine orientated simply has integer.

A useful feature I’d like to see make it’s way into PHP are the attr_reader, attr_writer and attr_accessor attribute visibility functions. These save a fair amount of code you’d otherwise have to write in PHP and Java when providing accessors and mutators.

I’ve only scratched the surface so far but I can already see the appeal of this language – it’s succinct and the code to functionality ratio is refreshing.