On Dec 28, 2005, at 10:54 AM, Steve Litt wrote:

> On Wednesday 28 December 2005 11:37 am, James Edward Gray II wrote:
>> On Dec 28, 2005, at 10:13 AM, Steve Litt wrote:
>>> Have em start with HelloWorld, then a loop...
>>
>> Hmm, that's a tricky one to me.  You really need to nail iterators
>> ASAP to become a Rubyist.  If you post code here with a loop, odds
>> are good we'll start "correcting" it.
>
> That's precisely my point. I'm advocating some "corretion". If you  
> start a
> non-motivated learner with iterators, he'll bail. The long term  
> goal is to
> turn him into a Rubyist, but the immediate goal is to have him  
> accept Ruby
> enough to learn a couple more things.

It's an interesting idea.

>> Also Ruby has no loop equivalent to the famous for(...; ...; ...)
>> { ... } construct from most other languages.
>
> for ss in 1...10
> 	print ss, " Hello\n";
> end

1.  That's not a loop.  (It's syntactic sugar for the each() iterator.)
2.  It's not equivalent to for(...; ...; ...) { ... }.
3.  I'm against teaching that at all.  ;)

> ss = 4
> while ss > 0
> 	puts ss
> 	ss -= 1
> end

If you're looking to go from ugly to pretty, I agree that you've  
found ugly.  ;)

>>> Show them how much easier inheritance is in Ruby than in C++.
>>
>> "Favor composition over inheritance."  I think that's even more true
>> in Ruby where inheriting the core classes sometimes has surprising
>> side effects.
>
> OK, show em how easy composition is, and how well it can be  
> encapsulated.
> attr_accessor rules.

"Push, don't pull."  (I'm just full of great quotes today, eh?   
<laughs>)

I think I understand what you're trying to say though...

James Edward Gray II