(slight ot, sorry!) This brings back great memories of one of the best assignment from my college time: We had an "Agile web development" course (~2007) with a precursory Ruby 101 workshop as well as a pre-course assignment to "create a shell in Ruby". It was such a joy to hack on this and learn that way. It was clearly wayyy too vast of a task to ever _complete_ it, but I learned so much Ruby there and couldn't stop working on the project. Thanks Carsten Bormann for being a great teacher!
And thanks op for reminding me of this :)