To Ruby With ♥

First of all, I admit I was hesitant at first to learning a new language, much less a programming language. In all honesty, I would much rather learn a spoken language like Japanese but let's stick to the topic, shall we? The past two years I was stuck in this love-hate relationship with java; it with all its syntax rules, and long

System.out.print(); and System.out.println();

print statements, those evasive semicolons (;) and error messages - oh, the error messages! They never really did help me as much as confuse me every time they popped up on the left side of the computer monitor, especially when a semicolon was misplaced. As you can probably tell, I'm one of the many that have issues working with java and it became something that I thoroughly enjoyed at the beginning to something I silently loathed every time an instructor assigned a programming assignment... until I was introduced to Ruby.

With Ruby, I thought 'there's still hope yet!' after completing several exercises on codecademy. I realized while working with it just how much I really enjoy the simplicity of it and its syntax and how I was able to ease through it compared to java's verbal redundancies. Thank you so much, Yukihiro Matsumoto! You've done many up-and-coming programmers, including me, a great service by providing us with this.

As I am still new to working with Ruby, I can't say 'Oh, Ruby is so much better than Java blah blah blah...' - though, of course I could because I am entitled to my own opinions in this case. However, I don't think it would be right to base it solely on what I've come across briefly versus what I have worked with in Java. So, I went searching through various Ruby versus Java articles and I stumbled upon a blog, Ruby vs Java, written by this guy named Diego. In his blog, he lists out the advantages of working with Ruby and the advantages of Java. I'll jot down a summarized list of the things he wrote below:

Ruby Advantages

• Everything is an Object
• Modules
• Blocks of Code
• Duck Typing and Syntactic Sugars
• No compilation Required

Java Advantages

• Performance
• Multi-threading and Concurrency
• Interfaces
• IDE Support

I really like that in his blog, he mentions that "Ruby speaks English" - for me and maybe countless others, it does, it really does. Although at the moment, I dislike java with a passion, it's impossible to stop using it and drop it because it's so ingrained into our everyday lives - programmer or not. Most especially since it's something akin to a first love; as they say, you never really forget your first love. So, for all you java lovers out there and the part of me that still kind of does, sing and dance your heart out to this. ;)