Success with Ruby and BASIC

A while back, I started a project to learn Ruby. The project was to implement a version of BASIC, using that as a means to learn the Ruby language.

I am happy with my progress. I've learned a great deal about Ruby -- and learned more about programming. Ruby has a different "take" on programming than C++, Java, and C#, and those differences forced me to re-think a lot of ideas about programming. The design patterns for Ruby are different from the patterns of the "classical" object-oriented languages. I found that much of my code followed the classic patterns, and it worked poorly. Only after I changed my thinking about programming and my designs in Ruby did my code "work".

Rubocop helped too. It complained about many things, from spacing around operators (or lack thereof) to the number of lines and complexity of functions. At first I thought that some long functions would have to remain long -- in C++ or Java I would leave them as long functions. But with Rubocop's prodding, I redesigned them and made them smaller, many times breaking them into smaller functions.

i started using Rubocop after a significant amount of code had been written, and Rubocop reported somewhere north of 80 "violations". Over time, with thought and experimentation, I have reduced that number to one. The changes have, I believe, improved the code and made it more reliable and more readable.

My success has been due to the design of the Ruby language, the Rubocop tool, the Ruby documentation pages, and StackOverflow. These made it easy to develop in Ruby. Yet there were two other things: an open mind and time. I needed to change my thinking about programming, and accept the Ruby way of code. I also needed time. Time to think about the code, time to try things, and time to revise my initial code into something better.