From: miles@... (Miles Egan)
Date: 2001-03-12T05:10:07+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:12425] ruby - first impressions

I've been playing with ruby for the past week or two and I'm quite impressed.
It seems to be a very cleanly and thoughtfully designed language that borrows
a lot of good ideas from other languages I like.

Some of my favorite features:
* pervasive object orientation.
    It really is a pleasure to finally use a language in which EVERYTHING
    is an object.
* iterators
    I find ruby's iterators to be both very expressive and flexible.  I
    expect them to greatly simplify many common coding tasks.
* the consistent use of function suffix puncutation
    Ruby seems to have borrowed scheme's convention of using the '!' suffix
    for in-place or destructive methods and '?' for boolean predicates.  I think
    that this convention is a great aid to readability.
* uniform access principle
    I commend matz for borrowing from Bertrand Meyer the idea that instance 
    variables of a class should never be accessed directly but rather accessed
    through an accessor function.
* a clean and straightforward c interface api
* surprisingly full-featured and mature libraries
    Perhaps due in part to the ease of extending ruby in c.  With everything
    from eruby to ruby-ldap, ruby seems ready for real-world jobs.
* lightweight threads
    It would be nice to also have a native thread.

There are also a few features that seem confusing or counter-intuitive:
* optional parentheses for invocation of no-arg functions
    I dislike this feature in perl so I'm a bit unhappy to find it here.  I 
    suppose it might be a consequence of the uniform access principle, but the
    tricks the compiler has to play to distinguish variable references from
    function calls seem a bit nasty.
* strange precedence of boolean operators
    Why do '||' and 'and' have difference precedence?
* inconsistent scoping rules
    Why do blocks introduce a new scope but for loops do not?
* no default or keyword arguments for functions
    I know this is scheduled for 1.8, but I do miss it.
* continuations
    These seem far more confusing than useful to me and I know most scheme
    implementations bend over backwards to implement them without completely
    destroying performance.

Overall I'm very happy with ruby.  I'm very pleased to discover a scripting
language that lives up to it's own claims of simplicity and elegance and I
don't see much more perl or python in my future.

miles