recommends not using a distribution’s package manager but rather
downloading the latest version directly from the Ruby website.
Rust
Rust is developed by Mozilla, the people behind the Firefox browser. It is
advertised on www.rust-lang.org as follows:
...a curly-brace, block-structured expression language. It visually
resembles the C language family, but differs significantly in syntactic and
semantic details. Its design is oriented toward concerns of “programming
in the large”, that is, of creating and maintaining boundaries—both
abstract and operational—that preserve large-system integrity, availability
and concurrency.Rust is not yet available in the Ubuntu repositories, but as it is being
developed and used by people at Mozilla, it is likely to be of interest to a few
of this book’s readers and deserves a quick mention here.
Scala
Scala takes its name from “scalable language.” It is designed to grow with its
users’ needs. Scala runs on a JVM. It is suited for both functional and object-
oriented programming. Scala programs are bytecode compatible with Java,
and you can call either language from the other. Support for the .NET
Framework is also available. Scala syntax is much more succinct than that of
Java. Programs are generally shorter to write. As in Ruby, in Scala everything
is an object. Types are inferred and do not need to be made explicit. Like
Clojure, it suits the desire that many have to perform functional programming
on a JVM.
To use Scala on Ubuntu, you write programs in your favorite text editor. To
compile, you need the package scala. To compile, use scalac sourceFile
and to run using the interpreter, use scala sourceFile.
Scratch
Scratch is a programming language primarily designed for educators and
children. It is from MIT and was created with the hope of making it easy to
create fun interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art, all while
teaching creative thinking, systematic reasoning skills, mathematical and
computational ideas, and collaboration. Creations can be shared on the web