From: Niklas Frykholm <niklas@...>
Date: 2001-11-13T17:34:03+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:24989] Re: Linux Magazine article

[Dave Thomas]
> 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?

Two things that I haven't seen mentioned yet, but that are among my
favorite features.


Intuitivity of method names

    I'm not sure how I would present this in an article, but with Ruby I
    very seldom have to turn to reference documentation when I'm coding.
    Part of the reason is the full OO (2.upto(5) is brilliant) -- I
    don't have to think about whether something is a function or a
    method. The other part is that matz has done a very good job in
    naming the methods, and the bang-convention which means I don't have
    to look in the documentation to see if a method is destructive.

    And when I do forget the name of a method, I can just whip up an irb
    window and do

        String.new.methods.grep(/case/)

    Or when the name of a class eludes me

        ObjectSpace.each_object(Class) {|c| puts c if c.to_s[/error/i]}


Indexing strings by regexps

    I am constantly amazed by how often this makes my code shorter AND
    more readable.

// Niklas