Hey guys,

Well, I finally Graduated with Honors from the University of North Alabama. I’m glad to see it finally end, but also a little sad about saying goodbye to some of the friends I made there this past year. I’ve has suddenly been left with a lot of time on my hands, so I’ve been practicing RUBY.

RUBY is an awesome programming language that, in my opinion, is a real joy to use. I’ve been playing around with it for the past month or so. It took me all but a weekend to get the hang of the syntax, and now I’ve been learning to do more complex things with it. I like it better than even PYTHON, which was my previously held language champion. There is just something about RUBY that makes it fun to use.

Now that I?ve said that I love it, let me bring it back down to earth a bit about something I don’t much care for. For one thing, it?s not widely supported (yet). Secondly, there are still some bugs on the Windows-side of things. Finally, this one is somewhat related to the first, it?s hard to get it working on an APACHE web server.

Once all these things are figured out, I think it will really take off. Obviously, Windows is the most popular OS, so getting all the developer bugs out of it is a must. Apache is the most popular web server, so the same goes for it.

Sometimes, I wish that a language like RUBY could be the good old compiled kind. So I?d never have to use C++ again, but alas, it is not. I’d also like to see a GUI toolkit that is simple to use or at least works just like the language that uses it. The closest thing I?ve seen is wxRUBY for RUBY, but I still don’t like something about it.

I’m quickly beginning to realize that it?s not the programming language that makes the language fun, its more the tools you use to develop with, that make it fun.

For example, I hate hand typing every little tag in an HTML page, so I use Dreamweaver to speed up my workflow, sure you have to still know HTML to make corrections or minor modifications to the generated code, but it still works really well.

The same holds true with Visual C++,C#,J#,BASIC, ETC. It just makes the language more usable instantly. Keeps me from having to type everything in.

So, now I await a Visual RUBY application. I may be smart enough to do it myself one day. You never know.

You guys take it easy,

Jim