Hi,

Calvin wrote:
> Does anyone here think it's a good idea for a beginner to learn Ruby
> 1.8 and then learn Ruby 1.9? If it's better to just learn 1.9 and not
> worry about what 1.8 was like, I would appreciate any and all
> responses to this post.

Here is my personal experience: I started to code my first line of ruby 
nearly one week ago, I just used what was available on my Debian Lenny, 
at that's 1.8.7 .

I'm parsing text-based script files which are a few MB and I have to 
by-character inspect them, I'm not using regex (yet; it's a straight 
C-port for now). Since I've heard about 1.9 and saw that 1.9.1 is touted 
as stable on ruby-lang I compiled the latest version and wanted to give 
it a try, maybe there's some speed up (current parsing on large file 
takes > 15 seconds).

Unfortunately I was not able to test my application: I'm using 
CommandLine [1] and using 1.9.1 it just silently exits.

That is: no exception, no warning, nothing. I discovered the -W switch 
and was shown a message:

commandline/optionparser/optionparser.rb:341: warning: shadowing outer 
local variable - e

but changing the variable name didn't fix it.

I tried to get into it with the debugger, but I could not find anything 
as I'm not that into ruby yet.

For me, I'm not considered 1.9.1 for now. It's too hard to work with 
libraries I still don't know well when I just try to learn the language 
and try to get my small project going on.

If I would not depend on other libs, I would surely jump on the wagon, 
but that's not possible for me (and especially as a *beginner* you are 
just not capable of writing everything yourself, lacking the skills).

- Markus

[1] http://rubyforge.org/docman/view.php/632/233/posted-docs.index.html