From: James Britt Date: 2009-02-19T04:37:29+09:00 Subject: Re: What are your favorite Ruby features? Florian Gilcher wrote: > And, thats why I tuned in: attributing brace styles other then Your > Enlightened One to other persons inability to find The True Way. There > is a language called Python for that ;). I think you're putting words in my mouth. I have my own preference, and have so far found arguments to the contrary unsatisfying because they are usually based on previous use of parens in other languages. (The most interesting suggestion I've heard is to use the parens to indicate if the return value of the method is useful or not. That is, whether a method is intended as a statement or an expression.) I'm truly puzzled when people get their back up at the suggestion that their style preference is based on bias obtained from previous exposure to other language, conscious or not. I don't think too many people are deliberately thinking, "I want to make this look like [C|Java|Perl|PHP]", but surely there is *some* bias based on experience. Whether or not that makes anyone enlightened is yet another matter of opinion and not all that interesting a topic. I'm certainly not claiming it for myself. The debate is not entirely academic. New features and syntax are being added to Ruby on 1.9, and there are similar debates about the readability of many things. It's worth understanding why people have such issues, and whether or not the difficulties can be overcome by extended exposure, or whether there are intrinsic reason why something is hard for people to visually parse. Ruby is quite similar to other languages, and people bring assorted expectations, and to what degree those expectations should be matched or encouraged in Ruby as it evolves is a reasonable question. -- James Britt