From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2005-03-19T00:05:00+09:00
Subject: Re: Wanted: A nice clean ruby app to disect

On Mar 18, 2005, at 8:09 AM, Curt Hibbs wrote:

> We've started a new Ruby Users Group in Saint Louis, Missouri (US). We 
> had our first get together last night over dinner (many thanks to Dave 
> Thomas who also came since he was in town).  About 90% of our members 
> are new to Ruby, and we decided that a good way to get started would  
> be to dissect the code of a Ruby app to learn Ruby and its idioms 
> first-hand from *real* code.
>
> There's *lots* of Ruby open source projects and lots of code available 
> for study. But we have to pick something. I'm looking for some Ruby 
> code that is not too complex, but also not trivially simple. Something 
> that is fairly clean and makes good use of Ruby idioms. And, 
> preferable, something that makes good use of unit tests.
>
> What would you recommend?

I sure learn a lot reading the Ruby Quiz submissions every week.

Are they too complex, too simple, clean?  Do they have unit tests and 
make use of Ruby idioms?  Sometimes.  In my opinion, that's what makes 
them such a valuable tool.  You see so many different styles and you 
can decide what works and what doesn't.  I've adopted some 
habits/tricks in my own code that I've seen in solutions.

Are the submissions perfect?  No way, but I consider that another 
feature.  Sometimes I spend a lot of time playing with a certain 
solution to figure out how it works.  It's a rewarding search that 
teaches me a lot.  I'll give an example, just because it's fresh in my 
mind:

http://www.ruby-talk.org/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/122593

Take a look at that submission from the Crosswords quiz.  Glance down 
at the "main" code in:

if $0 == __FILE__
	# ...
end

See if you can find the subtle "bug" in that code.  It works, but not 
the way the author intended.  (Sadly, I found that one after I wrote 
that summary.)

Don't stop there.  The rest of that solution is quite interesting.  I 
had to insert a few print statements to fully understand it, when I 
went over it.  Even better, there's a handful of other great solutions 
for that round.  Compare and contrast.  That way you get to see 
everyone's take on just how to use Ruby to accomplish the same task.

Enough of the commercial.  I'm clearly biased.  I just get a lot out of 
the quizzes and hope everyone else finds them to be a valuable resource 
as well.

James Edward Gray II