I have to start with a confession. I am in love with Ruby! I am going to advocate for the notion that Ruby should be everyone’s first language. I guess that makes me a Ruby evangelist! That’s cool.
A very appealing second option for a first language would be Python. Python and Ruby are so similar it’s silly:
print("hello world")print("hello world")I bounce between Ruby and Python not because of their similarities, but their main difference. Run the repl in Python and type import this and you get this Easter Egg:
>>> import this
>>> The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters
Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!
I draw your attention to these two lines:
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
The Eurocentricity of this little bromide is obviously meant to be tongue-in-cheek. However, if we take it at face value, the population of the Netherlands represents about 0.22% of the world population as of this writing. So, the “one– and preferably only one –obvious way” to do something won’t be “obvious at first” to approximately 99.78% of the population!
So, unless you’re part of the 0.22%, my suggestion is to learn Ruby. Otherwise, be my guest and leren Python!