Ruby!

After reading the Bruce Eckel's blog after a long time, I found an interesting and entertaining link to a book on ruby: Why's (poignant) guide to Ruby . Being an extremely influence by Bruce, I got some conviction that there are only four REAL computer languages in the world other than Perl: C++, Java and Python. But this book seems to be re-orienting my views. I am going to download Ruby and let me check how far I can understand the real philosophy of the language.

Talking about learning a language, I feel that one should understand what the language is good for? Learning a new computer language gives me a new perspective to look at the problems. Besides learning the syntax, which is also essential part of the learning, one should understand the philosophy behind it. The way the language provides the abstraction of the solution space so that problems in the real world can be solved. The essential feature of any programmer is to map and abstract the problem space to the solution space. The problem space is the subset of the real world. It mightbe a domain (vertical) or any particular set of problems in one field. The solution space in the programmer's perspective is composed of computers (Workstations, Servers, Network, and Memory). The basic purpose of the computer language is to provide tools for abstracting the solution space so that the real world or the entities of the problem space can be represented. And that's why we have the Object Oriented programming.

Consider a problem space of manufacturing company's one particular department: Accounts. In the problem space (Accounts department) we might have the following entities: Account, Accountant, Accounts Manager etc. But the solution space (software for accounts department) we are developing for the Accounts department will contain the computers/networks and memory. So the language we are going to use should be able to give us the facility to create the entities of account, accountant and manager. And it should take care of the essential conversion of the accountant (properties and behavior) into the computer's memory. This is what essentially all the OO programming languages do.

I am going to start learn Ruby, will post more code here.

Coming to work place: I am working on design of three new prototypes to test feasibility. One of which is the protocol switching. I am currently writing some proof of concept coding.

More soon.....