No thrill on Ruby yet
Written by on in Snaking.

Just wrote my first Ruby script (I've only read about it before this).  I'm not falling in love yet... can't say I'm really even finding it beautiful.  All those "ends" scattered around, scoping with line-noise.  I see the niceness of the block abstraction, but I haven't yet come to need them.  Ah well, suppose I should plough through a lot more before I start really evaluating it.

Comments

  1. Marius Gedminas

    Marius Gedminas on 11/20/2008 5:53 a.m. #

    I believe you already have the thing that makes other people fall in love with Ruby -- the high level of abstraction -- in Python.

    OTOH back when I was a proud Perl programmer I couldn't see what the buzz was about with Python until I actually used it for two weeks. Take my opinion with a grain of salt.

  2. Lars Hoss

    Lars Hoss on 11/20/2008 6:32 a.m. #

    What I like about Ruby is that this language is really object oriented. No need for self, you can do things like "5.times do ..." and so on. The power of the language, however, has drawbacks, too. Because some developers are more or less abusing it. The result is hard to read code thanks all to kinds of "magic" involved. This, for example, is the reason why Merb was created. Because the Merb developers felt that the Rails codebase contains way too much black magic and is therefore not easy to maintain.

  3. Jeremiah Dodds

    Jeremiah Dodds on 11/20/2008 6:59 a.m. #

    Let ruby grow on you for a bit, and get comfortable with its idioms. It's got a different mindset than python, and writing python code in ruby won't turn you on to ruby's magic.

    That said, ruby is a fine language (and the block abstraction really does come in handy), but I prefer python.

    @lars:
    If you want to really play with an object oriented system without a lot of the messiness that you get at higher levels in ruby, check out smalltalk (from which ruby got at least part of its inspiration).

  4. Kevin

    Kevin on 11/20/2008 7:24 a.m. #

    I have never been able to get past the horrible whale-guts syntax issues (read as "child of perl").

  5. Justus

    Justus on 11/20/2008 5:36 p.m. #

    >> isinstance(5, object)
    True

    Lars, I think you are mistaking syntax for "object oriented-ness". The use of self has nothing to do with being "really object oriented". Python has a non-uniform syntax, which definitely has warts and drawbacks.

  6. Richard Jones

    Richard Jones on 11/20/2008 6:54 p.m. #

    I've only written a very brief amount of Ruby. I don't particularly like it. It feels too much like Perl and it's hard to say how much I've been turned off that language after working with it professionally for 18 months ;)

    Every now and then I feel like it'd be nice to use anonymous code blocks in Python. But then I just get the same thing by defining a throw-away function :)

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