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Read this post ‘unless’ you’re not a Ruby developer

jesseduffield.com

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Re: Read this post ‘unless’ you’re not a Ruby developer

#141
post #135
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this is somewhat prevalent in the Ruby community as of late where people try as hard as possible to "lock down" the language and limit the ways you can get to a solution in the name of the proverbial "ease of understanding". I wholeheartedly disagree and believe we should instead grow the developers to understand these different approaches as opposed to labeling half of the language "bad practice". As I sai…

>"As I said in another comment. Ruby was built to have multiple ways of doing the same tasks and criticizing it for this is... pointless. Yes people can create monstrosities with all of these variations, but that's true with any powerful tool. If you dislike Ruby for being Ruby, pick another language." Exactly the reasons I use C++. Well, after crazy performance, efficiency and single executable deployment.

I like C++ because I find angle brackets to be harmonious to the eye.

Re: Read this post ‘unless’ you’re not a Ruby developer

#142
I work with so many languages on a regular basis, I specifically avoid such language features, I won't even use the x if y syntax. My cognitive effort is better spent memorizing other specific things about the language.

That said, I think the author is overselling the need to not use such features. Despite my aversion to using such features, I have no problem reading them.

Re: Read this post ‘unless’ you’re not a Ruby developer

#143
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this is somewhat prevalent in the Ruby community as of late where people try as hard as possible to "lock down" the language and limit the ways you can get to a solution in the name of the proverbial "ease of understanding". I wholeheartedly disagree and believe we should instead grow the developers to understand these different approaches as opposed to labeling half of the language "bad practice". As I sai…

I love an expressive programming language, it’s why Go makes me feel like I’m brushing my teeth with sandpaper… But there’s such a thing as too much flexibility, expressiveness and flexibility often go hand in hand as flexible language lets you make things as expressive as you want… but things can be expressive without the same level of flexibility if they are well designed. I find Rust strikes a good balance for low…

I do not program in Ruby as there was no business need but I have rough idea on what it can do. My view on the horror you've encountered is that the so called "programmers" that produce such abominations should be sent back to school.

I understand business idea of having monkeys producing code for cheap but I think this approach is misguided.

Re: Read this post ‘unless’ you’re not a Ruby developer

#144

I don't have a problem with double negation but I hate ruby for this kind of design - pointless aliases for everything. It's the exact opposite of pythons "There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it" - they intentionally create solutions that have zero practical benefit - it's just fuels arguments based on preferences and introduces mental overhead due to inconsistency.

Python is a communist apartment block, brutal in design and conformity and not very efficient.

Re: Read this post ‘unless’ you’re not a Ruby developer

#146

I'd consider myself a writer more than a developer, but I've been working in Rails for over 15 years, and one of my absolute favourite things is "unless". Why? Because it allows you to express yourself more elegantly. The click-bait title is misleading. It's meant to ridicule "unless", but actually achieves the opposite. If you were to write the title of the post as code, it would be: unless !ruby_dev read article en…

You've demonstrated that it is trivially replaced by 'if' and negation. I think that's almost the definition of inelegant.

Re: Read this post ‘unless’ you’re not a Ruby developer

#147
post #128

Unless seems to be pretty common in many languages. https://www.indifferentlanguages.com/words/unless In my mind the javascript community would do well to address the idiosyncrasies in its language standard before criticizing other languages for using common human language patterns. If you want to pick on ruby for being weird with conditionals, consider the following. if 0 puts 'true' end which will print true. I thi…

Only false and nil are falsey, and the language shines for it. There is nothing weird about zero being a truthy value.

Yes, this is one of ruby's best features.

Re: Read this post ‘unless’ you’re not a Ruby developer

#149
post #128

Unless seems to be pretty common in many languages. https://www.indifferentlanguages.com/words/unless In my mind the javascript community would do well to address the idiosyncrasies in its language standard before criticizing other languages for using common human language patterns. If you want to pick on ruby for being weird with conditionals, consider the following. if 0 puts 'true' end which will print true. I thi…

Only false and nil are falsey, and the language shines for it. There is nothing weird about zero being a truthy value.

In what other languages does 0 evaluate to true?
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