David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

Getting hello world running in Ruby is basically puts, P-U-T-S, space, start quotes, hello world, end quotes, you're done.

Right?

There's no fluff.

There's nothing to wrap it into.

There are other languages that does that, especially in the Perl or Python would be

rather similar, but Go would not, Java would not.

There's a lot of other languages that have a lot more ceremony and boilerplate.

Ruby has none of it.

So it's a wonderful starting language.

There's a book called Learn to Program by Pine that uses Ruby essentially to just teach basic programming principles that I've seen heavily recommended.

So that's a great language.

How quickly would you go to Rails?

It depends on what you want to do.

If you want to build web applications, go to Rails right away.

Learn Ruby along with Rails because I think what really helps power through learning programming is to build programs that you want, right?

If you're just learning it in the abstract, it's difficult to motivate yourself to actually do it well.

Some people learn languages just for the fun of them.

Most people do not.

Most people learn it because they have a mission.

They want to build a program.