From: Curt Hibbs <curt@...>
Date: 2005-03-19T14:31:49+09:00
Subject: Re: Wanted: A nice clean ruby app to disect

Thanks, I'll take a look.

James Edward Gray II wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
> 
> 
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