Ruby works fine with FizzBuzz.

Rails is a tool for building WebApps which makes use of Ruby.

Ruby and Rails are not the same thing.

When I say “good Computer Scientist” I’m talking about very basic skills in logic and reasoning. What I find frightening about this whole raft of comment across the net on my original article is how many of those commenting on what I write seem to lack basic reasoning skills and thus seem unable to follow what I thought was fairly simple little arguments.

Thanks for stopping by.

You make a good point about FizzBuzz.

Ruby (and more specificically Rails) doesn’t shine in doing problems like FizzBuzz.

It’s sweet spot is in building real-world webapps, so yeah, perhaps Ruby should not be used as a language taught in schools. (a point made above)

“Good computer scientists ought to understand principles such as abstraction and proof by finding a contradictory case. Therefore, good computer scientists ought to have no trouble understanding the real point I was making here.”

I’ll grant you that. Of course, I’d rather build webapps used by hundreds of thousands of users than be considered a “good computer scientist.”

But that’s just me, and where I’m coming from on this blog. Cheers!

No, I did NOT say that [1,2,3]+[10,20,30] should be [11,22,33]. I pointed out another article where someone suggested that’s what it should obviously be. I did this not to say this was the main thing I found wrong with Ruby, simply to give a fairly trivial example of what one person finds obvious another might not. I raises this just to urge caution about the argument, used a lot by Rubyists “it’s a good language because it’s obvious what all its constructs do”.

Good computer scientists ought to understand principles such as abstraction and proof by finding a contradictory case. Therefore, good computer scientists ought to have no trouble understanding the real point I was making here.

On the point about teaching Ruby to undergraduates, what I was pointing out was, contrary to some of the Ruby hype, that I don’t think, from my experience, that Ruby will make learning to program any easier. The fizzbuzz discussion shows this - if people are having trouble with simple stuff like this, does something like Ruby dropping static typing really make things easier? If they can’t do fizzbuzz, are they really going to understand some of the fundamental aspects of Ruby? Again, I’m simply trying to counter some of the hype about Ruby.