From: Sean Russell <ser@...>
Date: 2001-11-13T13:07:44+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:24979] Re: Linux Magazine article

On Tue, Nov 13, 2001 at 08:06:33AM +0900, Dave Thomas wrote:
> 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?

There were four primary things about Ruby that caught my eye:

1) Mixins.  A very, very cool feature, and the thing that set Ruby apart 
from Java, which was what I was using when I discovered Ruby.

2) It is good for small things, and it is good for large things.  This was 
very important to me.  For me to really buy into Ruby, it needed to be able 
to replace perl on the command line, and it had to scale.  Small scripts 
sometimes grow into large applications, and Ruby is really capable in this 
way.  I think this is what makes Ruby nicely compatible with XP.

3) Blocks, and things like blocks that take the pain out of programming.  I 
was getting really sick of writing anonymous classes to do really simple 
things in Java.  It has been said about Ruby that you spend less time 
writing code to support the code that really solves your problem than in 
other languages.  This is so very true.

4) Such pervasive OO.  10.times() gave me thrill.  I still love that aspect 
of Ruby.

There are two things I've discovered since which I didn't think were as 
important at first, but which I really noticed when I program in Java:

1) Typeless variables.  This promotes really loose bindings.  I love this 
feature.

2) No compiling.  Compiling didn't bother me much before I started doing a 
lot of unit tests.  I write a lot of unit tests in Ruby, and Java suffers 
in comparison.  Everything just takes so much longer in Java.

--- SER


-----=  Posted via Newsfeeds.Com, Uncensored Usenet News  =-----
http://www.newsfeeds.com - The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World!
 Check out our new Unlimited Server. No Download or Time Limits!
-----==  Over 80,000 Newsgroups - 19 Different Servers!  ==-----