Building Blocks

Building software is a bit like building a house with bricks (please, for a moment, forget my brilliant cake analogy described earlier in blogtime).

For a long time I have been using Visual Basic to build software. Building with VB is a bit like building with leggo bricks. The pieces are colorfull and easy to snap together. You can build almost anything but if you try to build anything too big, people will either say ‘wow, i dont believe you managed to build a 2 story villa with lego!’ or they will just snigger at you.

Building with Java is like building with house bricks. Nice and square. You have to use mortar but you can build big and small and you can put your house anywhere with pride. Building with C# is exactly like building with Java but the bricks have a little logo on them ;)

I dabbled with Ruby. Ruby bricks are pretty, they are translucent and have an odd otherworldly inner glow about them. To build with Ruby bricks, you dont need mortar and they dont snap together, you simply ‘talk’ them into place using a mystically mangled version of english.

‘Ruby bricks, form of a payment….no…Payment class with ruby bricks create!….no…Please, sniff, just work…no…dang’.

Building with Ruby/Rails is like building a house…with a house. The only variable is how long it will take you to come up with the house. There is a demo on the internet that shows you how to do it in 10 minutes. It took me 2 hair pulling, eye scratching, forum crawling days to get close to the same result.

Most recently (about 2 months) I have been building with C/C++. I am finding this to be infinitely more fun than Ruby/Rails. So far I have managed to build, well, a brick.

keep you posted :)