learning Ruby, IronRuby, the DLR, F# and DSL’s - so much to consider.
I just cant seem to shake Ruby off. Often something comes up in my day to day job that pushes me get serious about Ruby and for as long I have the idea of the Polyglot programmer in the back of my mind, I feel compelled to find out more, even if it’s in microscopic increments. A while back I installed Ruby on my development laptop and played with the interactive console for a while and then predictably got distracted and didn’t follow up for months, until today when I downloaded NetBeans (Ruby version only) and made a decision, that to understand Domain Languages better I wanted to learn more about a language that would help in that understanding. Ruby is well thought of with respect to being a useful language to 
develop internal DSL’s and given the other sentiment in this post, I thought it was as good a choice as any. I have been a C# developer since beta of the 1.0 Framework and now that IronRuby and DLR are close at hand, I feel compelled to let my interest in DSL’s, the DLR and learning a dynamic language begin to engulf me to the point that I have been stung into action. So with this in mind I am setting down the path to learn Ruby and hope that this provides a great springboard into taking up IronRuby. Of course the benefit of going deep into another development language and platform I believe will lead to a far richer appreciation of the platform I am currently so deeply invested in.
Last Minute Update:
After re-listening to the HanselMinutes podcast with Robert Pickering on F#, it would appear that F# is a potentially useful language for creating internal DSL’s. I have been thrown a little as I must confess this threw things into debate for a short moment. The argument that kept me down the Ruby path was the relationship that IronRuby has with the DLR and the upside that brings to the learning experience. 
Last minute problem solved. Wait hold the press. VbX or Visual Basic 10 is on its way and it too will be a dynamic language. Dilemma. Given that I am almost equally conversant in VB as C# (I prefer C# by choice), perhaps I should concentrate on F# and let my strong understanding of VB languages to carry me through the transition to VB10 which gives me the DLR leverage? Again I decide to take the Ruby path also because its not a Microsoft Language per se and I think the exposure to Ruby in general will do me good from a platform perspective. I would also like to use Ruby in exploring RESTful Web Services. So I have downloaded NetBeans and installed Ruby 1.8.6 and here I go.
