From: "David A. Black" <dblack@...>
Date: 2004-08-19T21:50:19+09:00
Subject: Coming from Ruby (was: Re: When to use parentheses around method args?)

Hi --

On Thu, 19 Aug 2004, Richard Dale wrote:

> But thanks everyone for the comments - I think I need to read more of other
> people's ruby code and then judge which style I prefer. If you have a
> smalltalk background like Martin Fowler, I suppose the brackets must just
> look like noise.

It's time for us to break the cycle and declare ourselves to have Ruby
backgrounds.  As much as we love Ruby, the community suffers from an
inferiority complex: people are constantly doing this or that, or
asking that such-and-such be added to Ruby, because of what is done in
other languages.  Yes, Ruby is a modern, combinative language with all
sorts of roots in other languages.  But it is not a pastiche; it's a
real language, with a non-trivial userbase and non-negligible history
of usage.

Richard, I certainly don't mean to jump down your throat.  For some
reason the spirit happens to move me at this moment to comment on this
in some depth.  I've spent almost four years listening to people talk
about "coming from Java" and "being used to Perl" and so on, as
rationales for both unconventional stylistic practices and language
change requests.  Sticking just to the former for the moment: I
believe that Matz and his colleagues came up with something really
elegant-looking and consistent as they developed traditional Ruby
style.  I think it's a pity to take the style apart and reassemble it
based on isolated decisions about small subsets of it -- especially
when those decisions are made on the basis of practices and
conventions from other languages.  

Nor do I mean that things would be better if Ruby programmers started
suggesting that Java drop the {}'s around function definitions because
it would make people coming from Ruby feel more at home.  That would
just be more of the same, in the opposite direction.  I don't think
Ruby should assert or impose itself like that.  What I'd like to see,
rather, is for Ruby to stop being singled out -- by Rubyists -- as
*less* coherent and entitled to its own style and idioms than other
languages.

This is, I should add, completely orthoganal to the question of Ruby
community citizenship and productivity.  A number of people who have
contributed vastly more code than I have to the Ruby world use
camelCase method names, def's without parentheses, and all the rest of
it, and I would not buy stylistic uniformity with a single line of
their code.  I mean exactly, and only, what I say: it's a pity to have
a beautiful, unifying traditional style and not use it.


David (who "comes from" Ruby :-)

-- 
David A. Black
dblack@wobblini.net