Jot Thought

Early today I was talking with Dean, our new Web Developer, about how I started hacking in Ruby. Like many Ruby hackers these days, I started off using Rails and then became more and more interested in Ruby. When I developed my first small Rails web application it was rather apparent at how much faster I could write clean, testable code. I also immediately began to wonder, how does Rails perform all of its magic?

The natural place to start looking was in the Rails source code. I was immediately impressed at how dynamic Ruby was. After I started to grasp the code base and some of the patterns, I started to fall in love with Ruby. The power of Rails lies in Ruby. I know there are plenty of other beautiful languages out there, but my background was mainly with c, C++, C#, Java, and PHP, so some of the Ruby features were quite new to me. After learning Ruby, I realized that my whole career, I was solving problems in a box. My problem solving and design skills were constrained by the programming language at my disposal. The dynamic power of Ruby opened that box and I now tackle problems in a new light. The more Ruby code I read the more my toolset grows and the more ways I can look at solving a problem.

I keep thinking, what will the next programming language be that changes the way I think this much? Is it something I can even imagine right now? It’s strange how paradigms shape our world and make it so difficult to think outside the box.