From: Matt Armstrong <matt+dated+1008203077.ebd2f8@...>
Date: 2001-11-13T09:24:41+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:24964] Re: Linux Magazine article

Dave Thomas <Dave@PragmaticProgrammer.com> writes:

> Andy & I've been asked to write a feature article about Ruby for
> Linux Magazine (www.linux-mag.com).
>
> I want to make this an upbeat article, featuring Ruby's strengths,
> and not other language's weaknesses. So, a quick poll request: what
> features of Ruby do you think would most impress or excite someone
> who hasn't used the language yet? What small applications would whet
> people's appetites?

Thinking back to not-that-long-ago when I first checked Ruby out, the
following impressed me.  The first item is what got me to keep looking
at the language and allowed me to discover the rest.

- Enough of it was similar enough to Perl that I felt comfortable:
  regexp syntax (including =~, !~, etc.), "statement if condition",
  use of $_, names of many of the methods, etc.

- The code examples seemed devoid of weird perl-like syntactic noise
  (except for regexps, which are inherently ugly).  I think this will
  just speak for itself in your article's example code.

- Power of blocks, especially in conjunction with iterators and
  Enumerable methods, and especially for resource management
  (e.g. File.open(..) { |f| ... }).

- Exception handling is simple, intuitive and clean.

- Extremely easy to create a class.

And after further digging:

- The friendliness of the Ruby community -- I think Matz gets a lot of
  credit for this by being a consistently available and nice guy who
  refuses to get into ideological debates and language wars.  ;-)

- Language is still being actively developed -- it isn't dead.


And I'll point out some things that others often say are cool about
Ruby but I didn't care about:

- Totally object oriented.  To me, this is not a virtue in itself,
  though the benefits it brings are.  This isn't something I was
  specifically looking for though.

- Totally dynamic.  I don't care much that you can add/change methods
  to/of a class or even a single object at "run time" (or, rather,
  that there is no distinction between "compile time" and "run time").
  I've found it useful a few times, but this isn't something I was
  looking for when I found Ruby.


I was just looking for a replacement for Perl that was easier to read
and maintain.

-- 
matt