Ruby for C# Geeks

ttention C# developers: C# is good for a great many things, but it's not the best language for everything. In fact, there is no such thing as "the best language." It all depends on what you're trying to do, and your personal preference and familiarity with the languages you have available. Although the Church-Turing Thesis suggests that anything you can do in one complete language, you can also do in another, the truth is not all languages are created equal. You can accomplish simple tasks with complex code in some languages and complex tasks with simple code in others. C# sometimes falls into both categories, but more often than not, it requires a bit more than its fair share of effort. Strangely enough, a language that allows you to accomplish simple tasks with simple code is rare. Enter Ruby, an interpreted, dynamically typed language that enables just that.

Many would say that the main difference between Ruby and C# is that Ruby is a dynamic language whereas C# isn't. However, referring to C# as a static language really isn't right because you wouldn't apply that term to an entire language as you would to one of the dynamic variety. Ruby really differs from C# in that its code is not actually compiled into an intermediate executable form before it is run. Instead, Ruby has at its heart a text-driven interpreter. This means that the expressions and statements in a Ruby program are evaluated as the interpreter passes over them. In C#, you must first compile the code to an .exe or .dll file to be able to run it.