I've been dabbling in Ruby quite a bit lately. I've worked my way through the Ruby Koans (twice now), and I've been reading like crazy (in my free time) trying to learn Rails. It is a very easy technology... once you learn it. That's where I'm at now; I'm just trying to learn it.
Things that would take me 2 hours in C# and ASP.NET MVC, take only seconds or minutes in Ruby and Rails. The big difference is that I'm familiar with all the complexities of the .NET framework and the tools that I use. Whereas I'm trying to dumb my skills down to learn something totally different now in a whole new environment. Ruby doesn't have a tool that allows me to do the rafactoring that Resharper allows me to do in C#. The Terminal.app doesn't have all the shortcuts that I'm used to that Visual Studio offers me. I can't step through my programs, I can't jump to files as easily (yet). Everything is command line, and this is very new to me!!
The biggest struggle so far has been moving away from the Visual Studio IDE. My new IDE is a simple green and black terminal screen. There is no intellisense, no syntax highlighting, no pre-compilation warnings, no nothing. I'm trying to learn all of the Unix commands that go along with managing source files. For example, if I need to make a solution wide change across multiple files, I can't just say [CTRL]+[R] / [CTRL]+[R] anymore... I have to run a grep command and manually inspect each file, one by one. I'm sure it will get easier with time, but for now, I'm struggling...
Anyway, tonight I'm attending a Code Jam that was announced on the Columbus Ruby Brigade website. The meeting is in Columbus, OH and I'm hoping that someone will sit down with me and show me some tricks. :)
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