The Ruby Learning Curve

This afternoon, I was hacking. Honest-to-God, code-flowing-out-of-my-fingers hacking. The language at the moment was Perl 5. I like Perl 5. My brain works in a way that Perl 5 can easily explain and (and this is key) I can tell Perl 5 what I want to do without a lot of syntactic fuss.

Let's be clear on this next point: this has nothing to do with writing Perl objects. OO Perl is, thus far in my coding career, utterly painful.

Whenever I think about making an object, I long for a cleaner, happier language. Python is too much of a toy and having to include self everywhere seems like a bad design choice on Guido's part. There's also Ruby, which web developers everywhere seem to go gah-gah over.

I'm not sure, but I'm starting to think I hate Ruby, and here's why:

"[T]he Module class of module is the superclass of the Class class of class."

This is, of course, completely true. The Class class has a superclass which is a module named Module. Guess what? I don't fuckin' care. I want to know how to make a goddamn class definition that doesn't have anything to do with installing Rails on my laptop. Two pages of Google links down and I have yet to see anything that mentions how to build a Ruby class that acts just like a C struct, which is all I really want right now.

Ruby: your community docs suck.