On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 6:09 PM, robin wood <= span dir=3D"ltr"><lists@ruby-forum.com> wrote:
Brandon W. wrote in post = #1112804:

> Blocks, Lambdas, Closures, Metaprogramming, and Enum= erables are the huge
> topics. Master them and you'll see a huge difference.

Got any resources you used to help get your head around all these?

I felt that the book "Meta-Programming Ruby" was very e= ye opening. It explains the object model in the first 100 pages. I recommen= d it based on what you've said. I rarely push books but that one seems = to be written by someone who thought through the pedagogical approach of Ru= by paradigm with everyone coming from different programming backgrounds.

On Wed, = Jun 19, 2013 at 3:45 AM, Robert Klemme <shortcutter@googlemail.co= m> wrote:

On Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 10:42 AM, Robert Klemme <shortcutter@goo= glemail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 9:59 PM, Brandon Weaver <= keystonelemur@= gmail.com> wrote:

The biggest jumping point for me is when I stopped trying to program Ruby = like C# and started programming Ruby like Ruby.

:-)=A0

Coming from C land you have tendencies towards a lot of impe= rative techniques, and Ruby is not solely imperative. Learning the function= al side of Ruby is essential to graduate into advanced topics.

I'd be careful labeling Ruby as "functional". =A0T= he only "functional" about Ruby is that with lambda you can have = anonymous functions which you can pass around. =A0The core feature of funct=

=A0

Sorr= y, somehow I hit the wrong button and GMail just sent off the email. =A0Wha= t I wanted to say:

I'd be careful labeling= Ruby as "functional". =A0The only "functional" about R= uby is that with lambda you can have anonymous functions which you can pass= around and create higher order functions. =A0The core feature of functiona= l programming for me was always functions without side effects. =A0And that= is not part of Ruby. =A0Of course, you _can_ code lambdas without side eff= ects - but the language does not enforce this.

Kind regards

robert

I agree with you. I am very = careful with when I write statements like that hence I said "style&quo= t; as in functional style. I am very used to That lambda is important thoug= h. It is essentially the primitive of functional programming( i.e. everythi= ng can be build from combination of lambdas) though it would be not very ef= ficient and is something which may be explained from a pure "theoretic= al language" it's neat to know. Some people have ported base schem= e implementations to ruby( as those guys port that language to everything) = with just the lambda (once again neat but not really useful)... bus scheme = I believe is one which is the main 7( or 9) original lisp primitives in 40 = lines of code.

Though from an analytical point of view it's refreshing = when the language creator explains his motivations when creating ruby:
<= a href=3D"http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/17964= 2">http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/179642

http://www.slideshare.net/yukihiro_matz/how-emacs-changed-my-= life

There are some others besides lambda and eval in= recent ruby releases such as both callcc and curry. But lambda the ultimat= e for those who are into language creation. I recall a higher order cons en= umerators. But it wasn't a pure cons (each_cons maybe). If we had cons = we could create our own literals and further car/cdr would simply be aliase= s to first and *rest of the list which for the most part is basically an ar= ray with whitespace instead of commas for delimitation.

~Stu