From: Randy Lawrence <jm@...>
Date: 2004-07-15T03:33:39+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Goody :)

Meino Christian Cramer wrote:

> Hi,
> 
>  I often saw discussions about "what is better" -- and not only
>  concerning Ruby. Most of this discussion were made (?correct word? or
>  is it "discussions were lead"? or..? Head.dictionary.use == empty ;) 
>  by pointing to "the other" saying "the bad thing with XYZ is...".
> 
>  I would be very interested in what other Rubyists do like most with
>  Ruby -- without any comparison with other languages.
> 
>  What is "your most wanted feature of Ruby already implemented" ?
> 
>  For the first I will start here with three things:
> 
>  1) The Ruby mailing list is a friendly place on earth.
> 	(Support matters!)  
> 
> 	and 
> 
>  2) You does not need to know everything about Ruby to handle it.
> 	This should be understood in two ways:
> 
> 	First interpretation:
> 	Ruby is able to be complex enough and to handle complex algorithms
> 	and to remain interesting. And it is simple enough to be
> 	recognized as an interesting "object" to learn from the start on.
> 
> 	Second interpretation:
> 	If you know a certain way "to speak to your Ruby" you can
> 	interpolate your knowledge to and into other programming
> 	situations and Ruby phrases and most of the time it works out of
> 	the box or with only a little change.
> 
>     and
> 
>  3) Most of the time one knows what to ask / to search for if someting
>     needs to be clearified.
> 	You dont need to learn a certain "ruby talk" to get
>     understood. For example: A string is a string is a string.  Ruby
>     is not that special in its "talk about" that you dont need to
>     learn a special language to talk about the language you want to
>     talk about. That makes searching for informations -- for example
>     -- in the documentation much more easier and (important not only
>     for beginners!) successful -- and this in turn keeps one motivated.
> 
> 	Enough said ;)
> 
> 	What do you think ?
> 
> 
>  PS: This is not intended to be the start of a flame war -- that's why
>  I dont said anything like "Ruby is better than XYZ, becaus of alpha
>  beta gamma..." 
> 
>  Kind regards,
>  Meino
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

* Ruby's blocks/closures/iterators combination is what I like most.  I 
love "yield" in its simplicity of syntax.

Runners ups include:

Ruby's active, friendly community.

Ruby's pure OO + design to stay out of the way.  Allowing simple 
one-liner or few-liner procedural programs.  And allowing expressions 
like "hello".length or 5.times.

Ruby's exception handling.  Even better than java's exception handling.

Ruby's support for regex.

Ruby continously adding practical libraries to the language.  For 
example, ext/dl (aka "ruby/dl" aka "ruby-dl") was added in ruby 1.8 and 
allows easy use of DLL or .so dynamic/shared libraries.

RAA + RubyForge + RubyGems growing/improving rapidly so those of us that 
miss perl's CPAN have a good foundation to start with.

I'm convinced an experienced programmer that reads a ruby book over a 
weekend will be more productive with ruby than with his current language 
(in more cases than not).