From: "David A. Black" <dblack@...>
Date: 2009-02-17T11:59:59+09:00
Subject: Re: What are your favorite Ruby features?

Hi --

On Tue, 17 Feb 2009, Tony Arcieri wrote:

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

I would say that altering core functionality badly is not a favorite
thing, but doing it knowledgeably might be :-)

>> 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.

I know people sometimes bundle the concept of DSL and the idea of
sounding like English together (with mixed success, usually, in my
view), but "domain-specific" doesn't really imply emulation of natural
language; it just implies a particular well-defined emergent notation
based on a subset of (computer) language constructs. At least, that's
how I see it.

I guess the only form of optional parentheses I actually would prefer
Ruby not to support is:

   def a b, c = 1

but it's not a very big deal.

>> 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}"

Whoops, I forgot that when I made my list.

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

It's definitely one of the Ruby rites of passage :-)


David

-- 
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