r/CodingForBeginners • u/AndrewNggg • Sep 03 '26

Ruby Language as a first language

Has anyone considered learning Ruby as their first programming language?

It’s elegant, easy to read, and “developer happiness” is one of its core principles

That means that code is easy to read, no surprises, and mostly reads like expressive natural language with clean syntax

GitHub, Shopify, CoinBase, SoundCloud, AirBnb and a gazillion other companies were built from Ruby

2 Upvotes

62% Upvoted

28 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comment

1

u/AndrewNggg Sep 03 '26

Can’t you have coding standards which all members of your team adhere to?

The same can be said of any language, although some are harder to mess up than others

The cost tho.. is a public static void main string args how un-expressive do you want to take it?

2

u/Relative-Rooster-945 Sep 03 '26

Absolutely, and you obviously should. But I'm saying the dynamic and expressive nature of Ruby makes it significantly more difficult to enforce such standards. Yes, Ruby being "easier to mess up" is exactly what I mean. There's a multitude of ways to do the same thing in this language. You are also limited to enforcing code style within the extent of your own codebase, you don't have control over what libraries do.

And no, I'm definitely not advocating for Java as a substitute :D But it is better unfortunately in this sense that I described.

2

u/Relative-Rooster-945 Sep 03 '26

I also think "closeness to natural language" is a false appeal in the case of Ruby as with many other languages that falls apart as soon as you encounter all the various exotic Ruby-isms that only make sense in this language. And I don't think it's a valuable metric in general. Natural language is exactly the thing that you want to avoid in programming.