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Ruby — A very nice, full-OO language

After playing with Perl for more than 10 years, including working with the perl5-porters to help porting Perl5.000-to-be to 386BSD then FreeBSD, I felt some changes were needed, it was not fun any more.

I had a look at Python but the syntax did really bothered me so I kept on using Perl.

Then, around 2000, I tumbled upon Ruby and the joy of programming was back! I just fell in love with Ruby, its clean syntax, the fact that it is a pure object-oriented language inspired by Smalltalk and Algol 60. The community is also great on mailing-lists and blogs.

At some point, I was doing like 95% of my programming in Ruby, not that much with Ruby on Rails as I do not really do web development. Its speed was enough, and despite a complicated Unicode support, it was a great language to use.

NOTE: This article was written when I was using Ruby almost full time.

UPDATE: Ruby is not my thing any more, I have since moved on to Go, and now Rust.

TDD, BDD and such

One of the nicest things about the Ruby community is that they have adopted most of the Agile principles and use them regularly. Concepts such as unit-testing, test-driven & behaviour driven development (TDD & BDD) are commonly used so I have started using them for my own projects: