On May 19, 2009, at 8:51 AM, Paul Mooring wrote:
> I really like ruby as well but my experience has been if he's planning
> on pursuing some type of CS degree he'll definitely need to know java
> and C++ for 90% of the programming related classes, so that might be a
> better place to start.
Here was my reasoning. In his freshman year he is going to have to
take a survey course that will touch on C, C++, Java and Scheme. At
some schools it may be C, C++, prolog and scheme. In his sophomore
year he is going to have to take algorithms. In both these courses he
will be expected to turn in pseudocode first followed by a working
program.
Now when I started my formal comp-sci education I already had
experience in several languages but I found that it was very easy to
write pseudocode that was very close to ruby or actually was ruby.
Then it was very easy to translate the ruby into the target language
because I had a working ruby implementation sitting in front of me. I
don't know if there is any other language that lends itself to a C++,
approach to a problem or to a scheme approach to a problem the ay ruby
does.
In the algorithms classes I literally turned in the same file for the
pseudocode part of the assignment and for the executable part. The TAs
who did the grading knew perfectly well what I was doing but they gave
me good grades. TAs tend to like ruby.
The ruby community was also very helpful and it was full of people
who knew any given language.
--
Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think
I've forgotten this before. -Steven Wright, comedian (b. 1955)
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