[ale] semi [OT] making learning ruby programming fun?

[Ron Frazier (ALE)]

Hi Leam,

I hope you didn't take anything personal from my shying away from GO at this point.  I totally appreciate you bringing it to my attention.  I even bought a book on it.  Intellectually, I would like to learn it.  However, I can't wait 10 years for something to pay off.  I have to be generating revenue within 2, max.  That's why I decided to shift toward Ruby.

In terms of the domain, I still like the desktop application domain.  I want to be able to build something powerful that is capable of running on a desktop or tablet which is NOT connected to the internet, or is only intermittently connected.  I haven't bought into the running Word or Photoshop in the cloud yet.  However, I will admit that there has been quite a lot of progress in that regard.  A good example of a program like the kind I'm talking about is Sky Safari.  It's an astronomy program that lets me map the night sky on my tablet.  When I'm using it, the tablet is out in the middle of nowhere, where it's dark.  It's not connected to the internet.  The UI and database for the program has to stand on its own.

Unfortunately, none of the non corporate centric languages seem to great for this type of task, mainly due to UI limitations.

I have to focus on 1 language, other than the tradebot language I mentioned.  And just trying to do those two will be difficult and confusing.

Sincerely,

Ron



Leam Hall <leamhall at gmail.com> wrote:

><lots snipped>
>
>Well, I'm looking at it a bit differently. It takes 10 years, on 
>average, to get really good at most anything. Thus, what I want to be 
>doing in 10 years influences what I'm learning today.
>
>Following that logic I'd recommend looking at the domains the languages
>
>are best at and picking the language that is in your favorite domain. 
>Want to be a web guy? PHP hands down. Performant applications? C. Next 
>generation systems code? I'm betting Go will be the C++ of the next
>decade.
>
>For my own self I'm happy being a Linux/Unix guy right now but want to 
>grow my systems engineering skills. So the short list for me is Python 
>and C, with Go in the back of my head. I'd rather learn C first and
>then 
>Go so that I'm able to access the body of knowledge built up and then 
>translate it better.
>
>I will also note that Python seems to have pushed Java out of the
>hearts 
>of academia. Fine by me!
>
>Leam
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Ron Frazier
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