Well, what actually happened (and I didn't put this in the post because it was boring) was that I fucked around with preexisting code for an hour or so, trying to figure out what pointed at what, then copied a chunk of code from another website that appeared to do something similar. Later, tweaking it and fixing bits, I ended up having to rewrite the entire thing anyway.

So what I've got now is a reasonable grasp of the MVC architecture and a list of useful methods that do things I want them to do. The regexp to parse the date formats was stolen from somewhere, and I would like to know more about the syntax for that bit. I probably learned more about RSS protocol than I did about Rails, but even that's something. It is at least significantly more than the Hello World I went in with.

> Typing fragments in and seeing if they work (as in compile and are valid programs) or not may be a good way to get acquainted with programs

Not convinced. I had to do that with the VBA at work because it was the only way to do it. (Get $BOSS_1 to provide documentation, or maybe just install a functional version of Access?... naah.) The process was long and tedious and didn't end up telling me anything about the object model VBA uses or anything that could be expanded upon. What it did do is produce a database that works, and since I have no intention of ever touching Access or VBA again, that suits me just fine.

I wasn't doing the same thing with Ruby. Even if I had been, Ruby seems to have a better structure than VBA, so I would have learned more about Ruby than I did about VBA.

> Expermiental coding may give immediate gains in terms of working code you don't understand, but that means you have little idea how to debug , maintain, or expand upon a program.

True. Working code was my immediate goal. Now I feel a bit better about myself and I'm ready to try starting a project from scratch (or closer to scratch) so that I can work more towards my ultimate goal of understanding stuff.

I don't appreciate it when you barge in and shit all over an achievement I was feeling quite proud of. I acknowledge in the post that it's a very minor thing. I am still trying to feel good about having done anything at all. This was one of those times where, if you can't say anything nice, you need to keep quiet.