From: Eric Armstrong <eric.armstrong@...>
Date: 2002-11-09T10:26:19+09:00
Subject: Lighting Rod

I love Ruby's smalltalk features. I really do.
I often wish that Java had some of them.

And the pattern-based string processing is
cool.

But...

1) Why magic variables?
     They're great when you are intimately familiar
     with the internal operation of the system. But
     miserable when you're reading code without
     having acquired that understanding. And even if
     their use is discouraged, that won't prevent them
     from appearing when I inadvertently code something
     that uses them.

2) Dynamic allocation -- Is that a good thing?
    I love things like the ability to add functionality to
    an existing class, like String. But I have also
    spent hours reading right past a small typo that
    caused me to assign to a new variable that was
    supposed to be an existing variable, or adding a
    number to a string when the operation made no
    sense at all. (Ah, Forth...)

    One of the things I *love* about Java is that it finds
    so many errors at compile time. (On the other hand,
    I love unit testing, so maybe Ruby really needs a
    unit-test framework generator, to find such problems,
    along with the many other bugs lurking in my code.)

3) 3.times.
    How many times does this execute, really?
    I saw one page that said it cycled through
    indices 0,1,2,3. Hopefully, that was an error!
    (If not, this item definitely belongs on the list
     of things every newcomer needs to know!)