Try Ruby: Online Interactive Tutorial

Standard Deviations suggests we try the Online Interactive Ruby Tutorial. If you don’t know the programming language Ruby and want to get a taste, this is really worth your time. Beautiful. We need to do the same thing for Python.

I’m not switching to Ruby any time soon. Python and Ruby are pretty much equivalent, but both of them are order of magnitudes more interesting than C++ and Java. It is a wonder that job postings never mention either Ruby or Python. Who is running these businesses? Even MBAs ought to know about the relative productivity of a programming language. In fact, they are the ones that should be most worried about all this Java and C++ work going on, just think about all these Enterprise Java Beans we will have to worry about in 10 years!

Disclaimer: I program in C++ and Java almost daily, by choice, and also, because most students only know Java. By using Java in my courses, I actually encourage students to learn to program using Java. No, I’m not contradicting myself.