Stamp Collecting Ruby Tuesday

Some people like my Dad collect stamps- Stamp Collectors.
I collect certain things in a similar way. And thus my friends have branded me a Stamp Collector in a light hearted derogatory way. It is certainly true of Tangerine Dream albums- I have an awful lot of their music- but Hey, I understand their groove.
It is also true of programming languages...I like to find isomorphism’s between them and to use different languages expressive powers to solve certain problems.

Since I am so into Object Oriented Programming (it is hard for me to think any other way) my peers have been asking me for quite some time why I haven't "collected" Ruby yet. I will admit it has been a strong temptation. After all I haven't started to learn a new programming language since I got flu in March 2002 and picked up my 4 volume "Handbook of Programming Languages" and selected Python (over Perl) as the next language/system to learn. Currently I have put my current Python project- the all singing all dancing Family Database on hold while I noodle away at my music. I know I will start driving it to completion as Thanksgiving looms and we contemplate shipping our newsletter to our family and friends.

Finally after many months of wrestling with my conscience the temptation to learn a pure OOP language allegedly akin to Smalltalk, became too much and I bought "Programming Ruby" from Digital Guru in Santa Clara one lunchtime. I have been reading it every night and have come to the initial conclusion that this language is not very good. It has too many syntactic constructs some of which appear only to be there on the whim of the author. Others seem be there to cater for the fact that Ruby is a language and not a programming system. Unlike Smalltalk it is not an IDE written in itself, so the author has added syntactic shortcuts to ease entering lots of data- clearly to me a function of the IDE to perform the shortcuts, not the language. I am used to having the absolute minimum syntax possible to get by with defining the underlying semantics.

I will keep you posted as to where I get to with this. You never know, by the time I get to the real implementation details, I may just fall in love.