From: Tony Arcieri <tony@...>
Date: 2009-02-17T11:20:52+09:00
Subject: Re: What are your favorite Ruby features?

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On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 3:25 AM, David A. Black <dblack@rubypal.com> wrote:

> Some of the choices involve coupling things that I wouldn't
> necessarily put together, like the standard library and its use of
> blocks (I'm not sure what you mean by the latter; things like
> File.open {} ?)


Sorry about that.  That one was a particularly bad case of trying to jam
together poll options so there weren't so many to pick from.

But yes, you're correct: in regard to usage of blocks by the standard
library I'm talking about things like File.open {}, or for that matter
String#gsub(x) {} or Enumerable#zip {}

I feel the Ruby standard library does a great job of making use of blocks
and feel that's one of the reasons blocks are so popular in general.


> or open classes and monkeypatching (I don't know which
> of the various meanings of the latter you mean; I think they're all
> subsets of the former)


Pretty much, that was meant to cover all cases of altering the definitions
of existing classes/modules at runtime by a facility which may lack formal
knowledge of what the original definition actually was.


> or optional parens and English-like readability
> (I'm ambivalent about both, but for different reasons, and it depends
> a bit which optional parens you mean).
>

This is another case of overlap... the "English-like readability" bit
typically plays into DSLs which use English words and generally try to make
your code read more like a natural language (e.g. RSpec)

I certainly understand that people can like optional parens for other
reasons but DSLs are one particularly compelling use case for them, I
believe.


> A couple of other things that might go on such a list:
>
> String interpolation


This was covered by the poll, I believe, although described as:

 Embedding code in strings with "#{mycode}"

I hadn't heard the phrase "string interpolation" before but that's what it
covers, correct?  If so, glad to know the proper term.  That's a
particularly nasty one to implement but one I'd like to try my hand at soon
:)


> Zero being true


Yes, definitely a noticeable omission.  I love Ruby's boolean semantics
although they seem to confuse newbies to the language.


> Single inheritance
>

Given how pervasive single inheritance is (and the fact I already implement
it) I wasn't particularly concerned about this, so much as using mixins in
lieu of multiple inheritance.  I thought about putting it on the poll, but
decided to just list mixins instead.

-- 
Tony Arcieri

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