- I was a bit confused with how method definitions apply to classes v. instances and how module inclusions and extending classes work into that
- Interestingly, I feel reminded of similar troubles I had with understanding Javascript prototypes, functions and new.
- obj.freeze appears to be a way to dynamically declare variables final. I suppose that could be useful
- you can always pass blocks to functions even without having declared them as arguments
- there is what I'd call reverse varargs that lets you explode arrays to match method arguments using the same notation as varargs, which I quite like. def foo(one, two, *rest) …
foo(*[1,2], 3, 4, …) - Having things like .methods on all objects to do reflection for debugging/getting to know the language is really helpful
- if I had worked through this before and added a bit of rspec knowledge I might have been able to contribute a lot more on the occasions I paired on Ruby at code retreats
Code is here.
So now a little bit about the learning experience. I'm greatly enjoying this so far and I think it comes down to three things.
The book
The book is great for getting you started in a language. As I mentioned on twitter I left with more questions than answers. But I now have a vague idea of where to look to find those answers. It's a really great achievement to pique the interest to go into the details of a language and to not make you feel completely lost doing so. I'm already looking forward to learning about Io.
The group
I'm also really enjoying our little virtual study group. People share their questions, answers or just share their fun in the learning. There's a lot of interesting blog posts already (aggregated here) and also quite a bit of activity on the github network for the project. I find this both liberating and motivating. It's safe ground for exposing your ignorance and at the same time I feel challenged not to slack off and actually keep working on it and do things like writing blog posts.
The technology
And I love the technology that enables this and the fact that there are people that care enough to take part in this. We live in amazing times! Programming is fun and being able to share that with others makes it even more fun. I love that it's so easy to organize this on twitter more or less on a whim (at least my taking part was on a whim). I love that to get started reading I only needed a few clicks on pragprog (even if the kindle version has its little issues). I love that github lets me see how others solved the problems given in the book, both reassuring me that I did something right or helping me along to find better solutions. And then of course it's great to be able to just download and try out all these languages.
