Doin' the Maple Leaf Rag

I’m at the Maple Leaf Lounge at Toronto airport, killing time until my evening flight to Dublin. I’m not flying business class or anything like that, but my United Red Carpet Club card was good enough to get me in. The facilities are w-a-a-y better than any RCC that I’ve been in recently – the booze is free, ((though my consumption so far totals 4 cans of club soda)) there are fresh veggie snacks, and the staff are really attentive.
My reading material for the flight is the Ruby “pick-axe” book. My impression after the first couple of chapters is that the language has lots of convenient features but there’s a certain amount of ad-hockery about how they’re brought together. When I’m learning a language, I like to establish a clear relationship between the concrete and the abstract levels of interpretation, and the concrete syntax of Ruby feels all over the map to me. Nothing that a few sample programs won’t clear up, I’m sure. Meanwhile the pure OO features are sweet…