10 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know About Ruby

First Things First

I used to teach an after hours course in C programming for employees of a large manufacturing company. It was pretty easy to tell what programming languages the students had used previously just by looking at the style of C code they produced. It is certainly true that "You can write FORTRAN in any language".

Java programmers investigating Ruby will find a language that look similar in many ways. There are classes and modules, namespaces and scopes, instance variables and methods. A Java programmer will feel quite at home in this Object Oriented language.

So the temptation will be to continue to program in a Java-style. Sure, there are some things that are different (the lack of type declarations will probably be the first thing that strikes them). But nothing that can’t be worked around with a little effort … and they will miss a golden opportunity.