# Who's a newbie? **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [August 19, 2006, 6:03pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/whos-a-newbie/65600 "2006-08-19T18:03:08Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![BobJ](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/b/0ea827/32.png) [@BobJ](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/BobJ)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2006, 6:03pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/whos-a-newbie/65600/1 "2006-08-19T18:03:08Z")
(Note - I’ll fix the margins before I post again) Like many who post here I am new to ruby but not new to programming. Also like many - most, actually - I’m more enthusiastic about the language than I have been about any language since Basic first raised its head. Why? Simply put ruby is a programmer’s language, not just a programming language. Programmers know how to program so they don’t want their new reference guide to try to teach them what a variable is or why GOTO is bad stuff. If you note the biographical snippets that come along with postings to this group then you notice that in most cases “newbie” means mew to ruby - not new to programming. Is ruby suitable for teaching programming to genuine newbies? I think so because you can use ruby as if it were an old fashioned procedural language then introduce the concepts of OOP when the student has enough programming background to absorb the concepts. There is another, dying paradigm from the 1970s that has a lot in common with ruby. It has gone by many names but is most commonly called “Pick” or Multivalue. Its main claim to fame was the speed with which a good programmer could produce a useful system. Its main problem was similar to a problem that ruby will encounter when it tries to muscle into the "main stream". It does not fit any accepted theory and it resists formal proof of completeness or integrity or whatever you wish to call such a useless proof. With Pick we produced elegant prototypes and called them production systems. We can do the same with ruby. The biggest culprit is also the biggest benefit to the programmer - loose typing. The second culprit is a little harder to see at first - the ability to reference a variable that is part of something that has gone out of scope. In simple terms, ruby and Pick depend on the programmer to know his business rather than some elegant but useless proof of referential integrity. Bottom line is I like it, I’ll use it, but I don’t think that it is any threat to Java or VB. But I wish. BobJ ---
**Author:** ![BobJ](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/b/0ea827/32.png) [@BobJ](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/BobJ)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2006, 7:15pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/whos-a-newbie/65600/2 "2006-08-19T19:15:18Z")
BobJ wrote a lot of spam. -1, Rant What was the point in one sentence, preferrably written in daytime with less caffeine in the bloodstream? David V. ---
**Author:** ![BobJ](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/b/0ea827/32.png) [@BobJ](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/BobJ)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2006, 8:05pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/whos-a-newbie/65600/3 "2006-08-19T20:05:25Z")
BobJ wrote: > (Note - I’ll fix the margins before I post again) > Like many who post here I am new to ruby but not new to programming. > Also > like many - most, actually - I’m more enthusiastic about the language > than I > have been about any language since Basic first raised its head. The original BASIC from Dartmouth was an intentionally limited dialect of FORTRAN designed to introduce programming concepts to non-programmers at an undergraduate level. While it has evolved into a usable programming language in a couple of forms (see below) its original form was totally unsuitable for use in professional settings. Despite that fact, it was used as such. 🙂 > Is ruby suitable for teaching programming to genuine > newbies? > I think so because you can use ruby as if it were an old fashioned > procedural language then introduce the concepts of OOP when the student > has > enough programming background to absorb the concepts. I disagree. If you’re going to teach Ruby as a first language, teach the concepts first – what is a class, what is an object, how does object-oriented programming organize the world of data and programs, how does one think in terms of objects, etc. Ruby is an object-oriented language, and there’s nothing in the whole object-oriented paradigm that’s “too deep” for a beginning programmer. > There is another, dying paradigm from the 1970s that has a lot in > common > with ruby. It has gone by many names but is most commonly called > “Pick” or > Multivalue. Its main claim to fame was the speed with which a good > programmer could produce a useful system. PICK and its variants are far from dying. There are even open-source PICK emulations available now! As I noted above, the original BASIC was not usable for professional programming. PICK BASIC, on the other hand, is a well-crafted professional programming language and fits the PICK operating system/database well. I came to PICK after many years as a UNIX programmer, so the concepts were somewhat strange. But I don’t see your analogy between PICK and Ruby at all. PICK is an OS integrated with a multivalue database and a full-featured dialect of BASIC. Ruby is an object-oriented language that can run on most operating systems and integrate with most databases.