From: Marc Heiler <shevegen@...>
Date: 2007-09-25T08:06:26+09:00
Subject: Re: Question about 2005 Ruby critique...

I think the point about "side effects" is rather weak...

Has anyone ever ran into a side effect that killed his program due to 
setting of $_?

The << is a very easy operator in the sense (for me) that it just means 
"add this stuff"... its one of the things i liked in C++ a lot.... cout 
<< "hello world" << some_var << "\n" (or something, my C++ is so rusty 
and i never spent a lot of time with it...)

The < well... he maybe has a very small point there ... it also means 
smaller than ... ok, but I dont think this is really any issue at all, 
and its short as well  :)
To be honest, I believe the "speed reason", even if I dont care really 
how "slow" ruby is anyway - i think that reason would be better than 
stuff like "side effects" $_
(The variable names are really non-intuitive and ugly though, i always 
use the long version if available... maybe except when one-liners would 
matter)

"but Ruby can also be written just as poorly as Perl is."
I think this is a _VERY_ weak point. Basically, everyone can obfuscate 
every language! Lets take an expert perl coder that tries to write good 
perl code and compare the same to one doing that with ruby. I did so (i 
am not at all a perl expert), IMHO the ruby code looks very very clean 
and thus beautiful.

I can not say the same about python in this regard to all the extent i 
do for ruby, although I'd share that getting rid of the end's is not 
that bad at all (but I have a huge problem with the def foobar():, and 
the need for the .method() and also implicit self in python ... in ruby 
i choose my way and feel free, in python well... ;> )

Just choose the solutions you like and try to opt for clean and brief 
ways (if possible). Didnt Larry Wall once wrote that the key to use perl 
is, to use its strength, and not its weaknesses? (He must be one of the 
funniest programmers alive! :-) )

Anyway, i think python is also a LOT better than perl in this clean-ness 
regard, at least I could see myself maintaing python scripts more likely 
than perl scripts. But for many problems, getting the problem solved 
quickly will suffice. For me I just wanted to have scripts that I look 
at a later time in my life again, and I am in big love with ruby's OO 
too so ... ;-)
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