What do you think about Ruby ?

Blake blake at kingdomrpg.com
Sun Aug 7 14:03:16 UTC 2005


On Sun, 07 Aug 2005 06:31:01 -0700, Jim Menard <jimm at io.com> wrote:

>> syntax. In other  words, the "foreign" construct of:
>>  1 to: 4 do: [:i | Transcript show:i].
>>  in Smalltalk is replcaed by:
>>  i = 0
>> begin
>>   puts "#{i}"
>>   i += 1
>> end until i > 4
>
> What? In Ruby, I'd write either
>
>    4.times { | i | puts(i+i) }
>
> or perhaps, using the Range class,
>
>    (1..4).each { | i | puts i }

Probably because you're a Smalltalker, too.<s> Or perhaps Ruby is becoming  
more like Smalltalk. But I distinctly recall reading Ruby's creator(s?)  
discussing this. It's in their book (available online at ruby-lang.org):

"Take a true object-oriented language, such as Smalltalk. Drop the  
unfamiliar syntax and move to more conventional, file-based source code.  
Now add in a good measure of the flexibility and convenience of languages  
such as Python and Perl."

> Less so every major release.

Well, while I like Perl, I really wouldn't want to see it infect a bunch  
of other languages.<s>

> Yes, Ruby isn't image based. That's one reason I like it: I can use  
> Emacs.

I have very mixed feelings about the whole file/image thing. I think what  
I'd like to see is a more transparent image. So that I could write an  
object--I wouldn't use Emacs (or vi, don't shoot me)--but I would like to  
have all the source stored traditionally in files, with images being  
created from those, and you could move back and forth between them easily.



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