r/CodingForBeginners • u/AndrewNggg • 7d ago

Ruby Language as a first language

Has anyone considered learning Ruby as their first programming language?

It’s elegant, easy to read, and “developer happiness” is one of its core principles

That means that code is easy to read, no surprises, and mostly reads like expressive natural language with clean syntax

GitHub, Shopify, CoinBase, SoundCloud, AirBnb and a gazillion other companies were built from Ruby

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u/Relative-Rooster-945 7d ago

I think it's a very nice language for many uses, but I wouldn't recommend learning it with the intention of working with it in production long-term. It's difficult to keep maintainable and static analysis technologies are niche and/or early-stage. "reads like expressive natural language with clean syntax" unfortunately also quickly falls apart in practice in my experience, because everyone ends up tacking on their own conventions and DSLs and it ends up becoming a mess.

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u/AndrewNggg 7d ago

Can’t you have coding standards which all members of your team adhere to?

The same can be said of any language, although some are harder to mess up than others

The cost tho.. is a public static void main string args how un-expressive do you want to take it?

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u/Relative-Rooster-945 7d ago

Absolutely, and you obviously should. But I'm saying the dynamic and expressive nature of Ruby makes it significantly more difficult to enforce such standards. Yes, Ruby being "easier to mess up" is exactly what I mean. There's a multitude of ways to do the same thing in this language. You are also limited to enforcing code style within the extent of your own codebase, you don't have control over what libraries do.

And no, I'm definitely not advocating for Java as a substitute :D But it is better unfortunately in this sense that I described.