From: Nat Pryce <nat.pryce@...13media.com>
Date: 2002-09-04T00:35:33+09:00
Subject: Re: OT: Just browsing...

My experience is the opposite.  The Ruby programmer community seems to
focus on maintainability, testing and using the expressive nature of the
language much more than on raw speed.  After all, Ruby is an interpreted
language; if we needed speed we'd be writing in C.

I think you are misinterpreting the value people place on Ruby's ability
to express complex constructs in a simple manner as a valuing the
reduction of "keystrokes" that results terse, unreadable code.  Ruby has
good mechanisms for abstracting both data structures (classes/objects)
and control structures (blocks, higher-order functions).  Therefore good
Ruby code will use blocks to express logic that would have to written
long hand in other languages.

E.g. using array iteration as an example, instead of writing code that
says "from the first index, i, of an array to the last index of an
array, get the element of the array at index i and then pass it to
function f", Ruby coders would write code that says "pass each element
of the array to function f".  That is, Ruby code expresses the what and
abstracts away the how, and that is what people are judging in the code
challenges.

On Tue, 2002-09-03 at 15:14, Albert Wagner wrote:
> This is really just Sort-of_Off_Topic.  I am currently in a state of 
> code-burnout and was browsing the web to clear my head.  Someone on this 
> list, I think, is a principle on this wiki.  I forget how I found it.  I have 
> noticed that whenever there is any kind of code challenge, by common 
> agreement the metrics by which the entrees are judged are only speed and 
> keystrokes.  I personally always feel incompetent to send in an entry, 
> because my experience has been business apps where correctness, 
> maintainability (read: where it's not the language that confuses the 
> maintainer but rather the implemented algorithm), and mutability.  At any 
> rate, I ran across this wiki page:
> 
> http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MostGamesProgrammersDontGrokObjectOrientation
> 
> It seems that many Ruby programmers have a "game progammer" mentality.
> 
> Albert
-- 
Dr. Nathaniel Pryce, Technical Director, B13media Ltd.
Studio 3a, 22-24 Highbury Grove, London N5 2EA, UK
http://www.b13media.com