[Pdx-pm] How quickly could you learn Ruby?

Ovid curtis_ovid_poe at yahoo.com
Fri Jan 23 09:32:43 CST 2004


--- Phil Tomson <ptkwt at aracnet.com> wrote:
> they've
> never heard of Ruby (these are management folks, remember) and where
> would they find Ruby programmers.

To give a slightly different perspective, let's put it this way:  at my
current job, 95% or more of our code is written in Perl.  We do not
require applicants to know Perl.  We require them to understand
programming.  You can take someone who knows Perl inside and out and
they can still be an awful programmer.

On the other hand, you can take good, solid programmers and they can
learn how to be good programmers in most languages.  I think the
management should be aware that, in general, a project will get much
better payoff with applying good people to a task than by applying
language "experts" who may not be programming experts.

> >ow long do you think it would 
> take you to come up to speed with Ruby and be productive?

>From the lite dabbling I've done in Ruby, I could learn that language
much faster than Perl.  I can't argue if it's really a better language
(I don't know it that well), but it's one hell of a cleaner language.

I strongly suspect that I could start doing solid work in Ruby in less
than a week (of course, I'd dabble at home, too).

And thanks for the Ruby link!

Cheers,
Ovid

PS:  As an interesting side note, I mentioned that applicants at our
company don't need to know Perl.  So how do we assess they're language
ability?  One of our programmers interviews the applicant and asks what
her best language is.  Then this programmer proceeds to grill them
about this language.  I've seen him write code in C, C++, Perl, Python,
OCAML, Squeak, and others.  Truly amazing.

=====
Silence is Evil            http://users.easystreet.com/ovid/philosophy/indexdecency.htm
Ovid                       http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=17000
Web Programming with Perl  http://users.easystreet.com/ovid/cgi_course/



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