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If you are coming from a standard C family language like Java(script), Python, or anything really, Ruby looks weird AF. It for sure has a learning curve. No par

• dismalaf 2y ago
  Interesting. When I first learned programming in the 90s as a kid, it was Visual Basic (no braces). A good friend of mine was super into Lisp. My dad (who was a programmer) also had loads of Delphi (Pascal) books, apparently it was the language to use in the 90's for quickly building apps. Again, no braces. So definitely not something I really cared about when I started learning Ruby (among other things) in the 00's. When they taught us programming in school, Scratch was the first thing they taught. Then Python. I was in Econ as opposed to CS so then it shifted to Stata and R (for those who didn't want to pay for Stata and were more into current trends). For dropping down to low level, Fortran. I guess where I'm getting at is maybe I just learned at a particular time when there were lots of programming languages that didn't have braces and were popular? Dunno. C was seen as low level sorcery, C++ was for games, Java I guess did become popular by the time I was in university but only the CS kids destined to become enterprise programmers used it. All the "learning" languages I encountered didn't have braces. Nodejs didn't exist yet. So yes, Ruby was very intuitive. It read almost like plain English, had very consistent syntax and was very accessible on Linux systems (which were becoming more common and already very good by this time). Being able to just "blah install Ruby", then open a REPL, have an interactive environment and run things immediately was very easy.