Ruby, a programming language that don’t hurt

Thanks to Thiago Arrais and his original post about the fact that “your brain hurts when you try to learn a different thinking line”.

Most of my professional experience, more then two decades now, I deal with procedural or event driven programming languages, Structured Systems Analysis, etc.

There are the 80s and 90s… Good years, when I start to hear and read about OOP.

When 2K years came, I could't avoid OOP anymore, and my brain starts to hurt. I started with Smalltalk (big mistake), new thinking line and totally different language syntax. My brain was in constant pain.

At that point I get the OOP basic concepts, but practices those concepts with that language was not easy to me.

After that, I try Java by myself. And achieve some steps further in OOP, but need BlueJ (hiding some language specific aspects) in the beginning, to do that.

Now I’m not a newbie in OOP and programming logic, but I think if I have Ruby on the first 2K years, my brain doesn’t hurt so much.

I don’t necessary agree with Alan J. Perlis’s 19th epigram “A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing”. For the record, I'm a big fan of the ALGOL language. It definitively affects the way I think.

But if you have to learn one, that really affects the way you think, it could be done without any hurt.

With Ruby, all the OOP concepts can be used on a very intuitive away (my viewpoint).

On my first steps using Ruby, two months by now, I have tried a lot. And most of the time I hit on the first shot.