Happy Birthday, Ruby

Post by mywrathacademia » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 11:38 PM UTC

jhbadger wrote: post #95

pavlov wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, maybe my problem is more with Rails. (Because of monkeypatched APIs, it’s not always obvious to me whether a particular weirdness originates from Ruby’s standard library or is a Rails addition. Arguably this is something the language has also encouraged though.) Is there any reason to use Ruby outside Rails? Its niche seems to completely overlap with Python and modern JavaScript, and those have enormously more e…

Python already existed when Ruby came out and before rails was a thing. I understand you don't care for the language but the main reason for its creation was to have a completely object-oriented (in the Smalltalk sense) scripting language which python just isn't. Personally, I like a language where everything is classes and methods and I don't have to remember to use a function rather than a method to get (for exampl…

Post by sametmax » Fri, Jan 11, 2019, 12:00 AM UTC

tomc1985 wrote: post #98

sametmax wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> having two distinctly different types of strings You must be talking about Python 2, the deprecated version for 12 years now, with support ending next year. Because last time I checked, current, modern Python only has one type of string.

Lots of shops still use Python 2 I was writing brand-new applications in it for my job as late as early last year Why the defiant tone?

Post by cutler » Fri, Jan 11, 2019, 1:35 AM UTC

sho wrote: post #199

cutler wrote: post #161

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I don't get this Elixir as the natural progression for Rubyists. OO/mutable Ruby and functional/immutable Elixir are worlds apart beyond the superficial syntax similarities.

> worlds apart beyond the superficial syntax similarities I never understood this argument. That "superficial" syntax is what I have to stare at, reading and writing, for 8 hours a day. That I actually enjoy doing so is therefore hugely important to me. I mean, you can make the same argument against Elixir itself, and I've seen it done - Erlang old-timers arguing against the necessity of these "superficial" syntax im…

Post by blattimwind » Fri, Jan 11, 2019, 2:18 AM UTC

thekingofh wrote: post #46

pavlov wrote: post #34

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> "Whimsical inventiveness is the one thing that keeps me enjoying the art of programming." A personality difference then. Reading clever code does nothing for me. I'm much happier digging around hulking layered codebases that may look ugly but do something valuable for the user. I agree that the cuteness of a programming language is just a matter of taste and habit. I'm not going to pretend my criticism was anything…

I think there's more to it. Ruby, to me at least, seems objectively more difficult to understand intuitively when scanning the code. Maybe it's just a superficial lack of knowledge on my part, but my brain makes base assumptions on how code should work, and whenever something magical happens, it's cool, but slows down the cognitive understanding enough that it seems to me to be a net negative. There's a crossover poi…

    require 'sequel'

    DB = Sequel.sqlite # memory database, requires sqlite3

    DB.create_table :items do
      primary_key :id
      String :name
      Float :price
    end

    items = DB[:items] # Create a dataset

    # Populate the table
    items.insert(:name => 'abc', :price => rand * 100)
    items.insert(:name => 'def', :price => rand * 100)
    items.insert(:name => 'ghi', :price => rand * 100)

    # Print out the number of records
    puts "Item count: #{items.count}"

    # Print out the average price
    puts "The average price is: #{items.avg(:price)}"

Post by pkd » Fri, Jan 11, 2019, 3:25 AM UTC

blattimwind wrote: post #207

thekingofh wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's more to it. Ruby, to me at least, seems objectively more difficult to understand intuitively when scanning the code. Maybe it's just a superficial lack of knowledge on my part, but my brain makes base assumptions on how code should work, and whenever something magical happens, it's cool, but slows down the cognitive understanding enough that it seems to me to be a net negative. There's a crossover poi…

> Ruby, to me at least, seems objectively more difficult to understand intuitively when scanning the code. Reading Ruby code always reminds me a bit of trying to understand how xmonad configs work. E.g. the Sequel example: require 'sequel' Nitpick: IMHO import-operators should operate on names not strings, because they essentially are equivalent to "foo := $magic". DB = Sequel.sqlite # memory database, requires sqlit…