Hi! Ruby is nice when you want to have a straight-forward, easy to use language. You can write stuff very quickly, there are few restrictions and it is very constistent (OOP). There are also some nice specials like blocks and mixins. Ruby has good support for additional libraries (e.g. Qt+KDE for GUI). But also when you simply want to calculate some things you can easily write 100 lines of Ruby. You should also consider that Ruby is terribly slow. E.g. if you want to try it a few billion cases in an algorithm, that is often possible in realistic time in C++ or even Java but not in Ruby. It is even slower than scripting-languages like Python or Falcon. Currently C++ and Ruby are my favourtire language, C++ does not know a lot of limits, is very fast and provides very cool things with templates etc. (compile time meta- programming), but it is also a bit complicated and inconstistent, Ruby is a really nice toy I use wheneverit is easily possible. A lot of people say that C++ is horrible, very inconsistent and complicate. But that is not true. Most stuff is very consistent but it takes more time to learn it, it is easier to think like Ruby than to think like C++. And please do not learn Java, it is simply a stupid language, inconsistent like C++, not as dynamic as Ruby and not as fast and not as many compile-time capabilities as C++. Jonathan ------------------------ Automatisch eingefte Signatur: Es lebe die Freiheit! Stoppt den Gebrauch proprietçÓer Software! Operating System: GNU/Linux Kernel: Linux 2.6.31.8-0.1-default Distribution: openSuSE 11.2 Qt: 4.6.2 KDE: 4.4.62 (KDE 4.4.62 (KDE 4.5 >= 20100203)) "release 2" KMail: 1.13.0 http://gnu.org/ http://kde.org/ http://windows7sins.org/