[ruby-talk:20045] Re: Ruby Article

On 21 Aug 2001 07:19:47 +0900, Joshua Drake wrote:
> I really want to present ruby in a good light with the next article.
> Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hello Joshua... thank you for writing about Ruby and thank you for
asking for help. :)

Other people have answered your questions for the second article. For
the third and fourth articles, could I recommend looking through the
Ruby Wiki?

I would particularly recommend Nat Pryce's work on documenting Design
Patterns in Ruby. This can be accessed via:

  http://www.rubygarden.com/ruby?ExampleDesignPatternsInRuby

Also of interest would be Colin Steele's work on the Ruby Cookbook at:

  http://www.rubycookbook.org/

This way, you could pick some examples of good Ruby code and explain how
it works, rather than trying to think of an example where Ruby excels
(which is hard, without knowing Ruby first).

The following links may be of interest:

  http://pleac.sourceforge.net/
  http://www.rubygarden.com/ruby?SlashDotPostingByRussell
  http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/~poffice/mail/ruby-talk/7056
  http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/~poffice/mail/ruby-talk/7044
  http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/~poffice/mail/ruby-talk/4541
  
There's a lot of material worth reading in the ruby-talk archives as
there's not much junk posted in here. You'll get lots of interesting
things quickly with a couple of searches.

Overall, I don't think setting out to show that Ruby is "better" will be
possible as there isn't really anything you can point at and say "wow,
this is better" - since it will always be possible to do the same thing
in another language. What makes Ruby good is the accumulative total of
everything being easy. It can do so much, and yet it didn't turn into
C++. In this respect, Python is a close competitor so you may have to
find specific issues to try and show the difference (but this probably
isn't worth the effort as it would take pages of analysis to pre-empt
all the "but you can do it like this" retorts).

Ruby has made the right selection (for some) of easy to do things that
combine together to make easy to do systems. The pieces go together like
Lego and the castle is built without having to get out the hacksaw and
angle grinder. Like Lego, there's only a few ways to join things
together so sometimes you don't get exactly what you want (eg, data
structures are Array or Hash or Object, you don't get millions of
specialised data structures). The benefit of Ruby is when you stop and
think "hey, I didn' t have to spend hours debugging - why's that?" and
you sit there and scratch your head in puzzlement not knowing why but
smirking with satisfaction anyway. :)

Hope this helps.