More about Class and Inheritance in Ruby

I'm starting to understand what my Rubyist friends mean when they talk about how awesome and intuitive Ruby is. For every concept I have a hard time understanding, it seems there are two or three that come quickly and make immediate sense.

I'm a little way into chapter 6 in Beginning Ruby and learning about classes and inheritance. Later in this chapter, I'll be walked through making a functional text-based dungeon adventure game, similar to Zork. I'm excited to get more practical experience with Ruby, especially learning how to manage and work with information supplied by users.

Anyway, back to classes and inheritance. It's a concept that's coming really easy to understand, but maybe just because it IS easy to understand. I am immediately suspicious of characters and/or bits of code I haven't seen used before. The first time I saw code written as:

class Shape
end

class Square < Shape

I understood the < meant that any instance of the Square class would also have all the features and logic of the Shape class, as well as any additional features and logic of its own. Aha! I don't think there is going to be one big EUREKA! moment when it comes to learning Ruby, but a series of small (eureka) moments.

Another couple of things I've noticed about learning Ruby are the effects it's had on me. I feel sharper, like my brain works more efficiently now. I haven't felt like this since college, and it's likely just a matter of spending so much time thinking about new ideas.

I also feel more open to meeting new people and I'm really looking forward to my first Ruby meetup this Wednesday.

One last thing: Does anyone else see Ruby as a sort of benevolent version of HAL, and when you get a syntax error it's Ruby's way of saying "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that,"?