ruby

At last I gave in to the temptation and started teaching myself Ruby. This language get so much praise in the world of 'real' programmers (and not the least, in the world of Perl hackers) that I just have to see what all the fuss is about. After all, if renown Perl hackers claim that Ruby beats Perl in everything bar CPAN, that in fact it is "Perl 6, here now", it sounds *very* tempting.

Why's Poignant Guide is unbearable, at least for me (I want just to learn the language, not to read volumes of twisted humor comics), but the Pragmatic Programmer's Programming Ruby (the "Pickaxe book") is much better and provides a very readable to-the-point description of the language. Another nice resource looks to be The Ruby Quiz especially because it provides comparison between various approaches in Ruby to solve the same problem.

Alas, I haven't found a parallel for one of Perl's biggest wonders - The Monastery, but Ruby does have a hyper-active mailing list with archives online, and its newsgroup also has lots of contents and action going on.

My impressions so far ? Well, Ruby is damn fine, I have to admit that. It is so clean, it's OO is the best I've seen anywhere, and the idea of code blocks with 'yield' is amazing. Haven't seen any shortcomings vs. Perl yet, though probably they are lurking somewhere.