Category: Ruby
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Understanding “reduce” (first in a series)
One of the notable things about MIT’s computer science curriculum, at least back when I was studying there, was that you didn’t learn any “practical” programming languages. Our work was all done in either Scheme (a dialect of Lisp) or in CLU (an early object-oriented language). I can’t say that I have too many memories,…
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rvm do
I’ve been using rvm for many years, and love it. Yes, I know that it rewrites simple commands, such as “ruby” and “gem”, so that I can use lots of different Ruby versions. Yes, I know that it can be overkill for certain situations. And yes, I know that rbenv is preferred by many. But…
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= and = aren’t equal
When I teach a Ruby or Python class, I always begin by going through the various data types. My students are typically experienced programmers in Java, C++, or C#, and so it no longer surprises me when I begin to describe numbers, and someone asks, “How many bits is an integer?” My answer used to…
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Ruby and Python and Felix and Oscar
I have been consulting, developing, and offering training classes in both Ruby and Python for a number of years now — more than 15 years in Python, and more than 7 years in Ruby. Inevitably, when someone from one of my courses hears that I use more than one language, they ask me, “So, which…