7stud 7stud wrote:
> What the??  I just spent two days trying to figure out why I couldn't
> reproduce the example in "Ruby in 20 minutes" and get it to work.  After
> examining my code line for line against the example code and not being
> able to detect any error, I was assembling several code examples into a
> text file to post here, when I happened to notice  'elsif'.    Why
> didn't Ruby flag 'elseif' as an error?
> 
> 
> Does Ruby try differentiate itself in ridiculous ways like that just for
> the sake of being different?  And why isn't something like that
> explicitly pointed out in a beginning tutorial?  So far, I have to give
> Ruby two thumbs down.
> 
> C++, Java,  Javascript, php, Servlets+JSP programmer
> 

I have a similar language background (minus php). When I first looked at 
Ruby, I spent a few minutes flipping through the Pickaxe, spotted what I 
felt were some "Perlisms", and made a knee jerk reaction to reject the 
language. I've since talked to a few folks who did the same, so mine was 
not an isolated incident.

It was about a year later that I came back to Ruby (because of Rails) 
and discovered that I like the language (a lot). I'm sharing this 
because learning from other people's experience can be helpful. I don't 
know if you'll end up enjoying the language as much as I have, but it 
may be worthwhile to invest some more time with it before deciding. I 
even realized that I actually like a few of the "Perlisms" - the horror! :)