Re: in search of a compelling reason to use ruby....

"Ryan Paul" <[e-mail]> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:[e-mail]...

> Ruby is flexible and syntactically mutable. It allows programmers to
alter
> the behavior of the language itself

Well, not really.  It just looks like you do. :-)

> in contexts where it may be beneficial
> to do so. It promotes self extension and alteration, and it introduces a
> lot of additional (largely optional) complexity that imbues the language
> with the capacity to be, at times, rather arcane. In many cases, ruby
> provides convenient syntactic shortcuts to automate things that would
have
> to be done manually in python.
>
> Ruby idioms dont feel as instantly intuitive as python idioms, but they
> seem a great deal more natural. I would definitely say that learning
ruby
> is a greater challenge than learning python. I would describe several
> facets of ruby as 'mind altering'.

I can't judge on learning Python, but I found learning Ruby quite easy
apart from some more sophisticated concepts (Continuations come to mind).

> Ruby's OO is significantly better than python's. Ruby promotes (and
> practically implies) good OO techniques and methodology. This is mostly
a
> result of Ruby's practice of making all instance variables private, and
> the use of a rather elegant means of customizing variable access.
>
> A few examples:
>
> Blocks are a rather simple concept, but they are, initially, extremely
> hard to understand, simply because there is nothing else like them.

Not in Python maybe (dunno) but in other languages.  AFAIK you have them
in Smalltalk.  And functional languages support a similar concept with
anonymous functions.  That's what blocks basically are.  In Java you have
to define anonymous classes to do such things but Ruby blocks are far
easier to use because they integrate nicely with the language.

> Python
> does not provide any profoundly novel or innovative syntactic
constructs,
> so it easy for any object oriented programmer to grasp.

Apart from the explicite naming of 'self' in method definitions which I
happen to find a bit and irritating, because it has to be provided in the
definition but not while using it.

> The axiomatic syntactic classes in python (lists, strings, integers) are
> completely and totally immutable. Python does NOT allow you to change or
> extend these classes in any way. This is done to ensure utter
uniformity,
> but it cripples the programmer immensely. Guido Van Rossum, in one of
his
> essays, says that python could easily support this feature, but he
> intentionally chose to disallow it to ensure that programmers wouldn't
> accidentally break each others libraries, or the python base libraries
for
> that matter. Programming around ideology like that is like trying to
carve
> a sculpture with safety scissors.

From my experience, these standard classes are normally only extended in
compatible ways (i.e. introducing new methods).  Nobody want's to step
into that trap. :-)

> In python, we have map, filter, and list comprehensions, all of which
can
> be used to manipulate lists in very general ways. In order to do certain
> things, python users have to stack multiple functions into map
statements.
> Generally, this is actually pretty simple to do, and makes things
somewhat
> intuitive. In ruby, there are a multitude of rather oddly named array
> functions that have very specific behaviors, most of which can be used
> with blocks to concisely describe extremely sophisticated operations.

I love especially Enumerable#inject.  Basically you can implement most
other methods in Enumerable by using #inject.  It's very powerful although
I'll readily admit that it takes some time to grasp the concept.

> In conclusion, I feel that python, because of its steadfast consistency,
> might be more appropriate for corporate applications, but for power
> scripters, who need power and flexibility, nothing beats ruby. I'd like
to
> know if ruby supports something like C++ namespaces,

Modules can be and are in fact used for this often.  You can reopen them
any time you like (as classes, too).

Thanks for your insights!

Kind regards

    robert