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Ruby's exceptional creatures

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Re: Ruby's exceptional creatures

#81

Post by weatherlight »

VonGallifrey wrote: post #59
weatherlight wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry once said, 'If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood or assign them tasks and work. Instead, teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.' This resonates with how I feel about programming languages. Python might be more practical, but does it ignite a passion for coding like Ruby has historically done? I remember dabbling in Python, Perl, and JavaScript (E…

This is more or less personal preference though. When you say that Ruby ignites a passion for coding for you then that might not happen for other people. For example I only feel a headache when I look at Ruby code. For context: I worked with C, C#, some Python and now mostly work in Go.

I think you missed my point, Its the community around a language that creates that "longing for the endless immensity of the sea." Not the language itself.

Re: Ruby's exceptional creatures

#82

Post by MrJohz »

vidarh wrote: post #68
VonGallifrey wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is more or less personal preference though. When you say that Ruby ignites a passion for coding for you then that might not happen for other people. For example I only feel a headache when I look at Ruby code. For context: I worked with C, C#, some Python and now mostly work in Go.

How often do you see people describe that kind of passion for Python? Maybe for lisps, Erlang, Haskell, Smalltalk. It may well put some people off, that's fine, but personally I dread it when I have to work with languages that don't instill that kind of passion. There are plenty of things I'd like to be different about Ruby and the tooling, but with Ruby I feel like I'm crafting something that at least has the potent…

At least when I was learning Python (which admittedly is over a decade ago at this point), there was a lot of that passion for Python and what made it great - you'd get things like the Zen of Python quoted, there was the "import antigravity" XKCD comic, a lot was made of things being "pythonic" and "for humans".

I think the major reason for cultural change is that there's fewer people learning programming for fun, and more people learning it either because it's mandatory or as a career path. In which case, the humour and culture that comes out of that is naturally going to be different. I think that's affected Python more than Ruby just because Python is more widely used, particularly by these newer developers. As a result, there's been less cultural shift in Ruby than in Python.

So I think in a sense, you've got the cart before the horse. Python has less of the twee humour now because it's more widely used by newer developers, who in turn are no longer treating programming as a hobby and instead as a career. That said, I can imagine if you want to teach the joy of programming as a hobby, Ruby might be a better choice. Although with that said, I feel like a lot of the hobbyist Python community has moved to things like Raspberry Pi and MicroPython, so maybe it's just a case of finding other hobbyists and doing whatever they're doing: the community is more important than the tool!

Re: Ruby's exceptional creatures

#83

Post by weatherlight »

p-e-w wrote: post #73
vidarh wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How often do you see people describe that kind of passion for Python? Maybe for lisps, Erlang, Haskell, Smalltalk. It may well put some people off, that's fine, but personally I dread it when I have to work with languages that don't instill that kind of passion. There are plenty of things I'd like to be different about Ruby and the tooling, but with Ruby I feel like I'm crafting something that at least has the potent…

> How often do you see people describe that kind of passion for Python? It's part of modern science/technology culture to indiscriminately hate the most widespread things. Personally, I find Python simply amazing and delightful to work with. And I consider its syntax, especially semantic indentation which eliminates so much visual noise, to be the best among all languages that ever achieved widespread adoption.

Ive been burned too many times by semantic indentation, (by mostly HAML and CoffeeScript though.)

Re: Ruby's exceptional creatures

#84

Post by erik_seaberg »

tpm wrote: post #77
stevebmark wrote: post #3

It's painful to see method_missing called out as a first class solution in the first creature https://www.exceptionalcreatures.com/bestiary/NoMethodError.... . "Practical Ruby" has three chapters dedicated to method_missing. "define_method" is more common these days and also painful to see. Ruby gets a lot of criticism for embracing magic and indirection ("Ruby, the bad parts of Perl"). It has some good parts (no fun…

These days (years) I work mostly in Java and would love to have method_missing or define_method. Of course I can do everything I want without them, but it's not fun.

Groovy has monkey patching and methodMissing (and propertyMissing) but runtime lookups make them slower than dispatch to classloader-defined methods.

Re: Ruby's exceptional creatures

#86

Post by ljm »

stevebmark wrote: post #3

It's painful to see method_missing called out as a first class solution in the first creature https://www.exceptionalcreatures.com/bestiary/NoMethodError.... . "Practical Ruby" has three chapters dedicated to method_missing. "define_method" is more common these days and also painful to see. Ruby gets a lot of criticism for embracing magic and indirection ("Ruby, the bad parts of Perl"). It has some good parts (no fun…

It's not really any different to, say, lisp (which is lauded for its intuitive support of macros) and smalltalk (which is what ruby was directly influenced by).

As a dynamic language, Ruby gives you a lot of tools to create fully expressive code. This is just one aspect of it that you can, but don't have to, use.

Re: Ruby's exceptional creatures

#87

Post by vidarh »

MrJohz wrote: post #82
vidarh wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How often do you see people describe that kind of passion for Python? Maybe for lisps, Erlang, Haskell, Smalltalk. It may well put some people off, that's fine, but personally I dread it when I have to work with languages that don't instill that kind of passion. There are plenty of things I'd like to be different about Ruby and the tooling, but with Ruby I feel like I'm crafting something that at least has the potent…

At least when I was learning Python (which admittedly is over a decade ago at this point), there was a lot of that passion for Python and what made it great - you'd get things like the Zen of Python quoted, there was the "import antigravity" XKCD comic, a lot was made of things being "pythonic" and "for humans". I think the major reason for cultural change is that there's fewer people learning programming for fun, an…

I'd agree there might have been more before, but even back then I didn't see the same level of excitement for the language. For specific uses, sure.

But most Ruby use is "corporate" as well - its use is dominated by Rails shops. The "joy of programming" aspect of Ruby is partially embedded even in corporate Rails use, but also outside of it. It may well have hampered Ruby growth, but it's also not something I think would disappear if Ruby use increased.

Re: Ruby's exceptional creatures

#88

Post by vidarh »

weatherlight wrote: post #83
p-e-w wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How often do you see people describe that kind of passion for Python? It's part of modern science/technology culture to indiscriminately hate the most widespread things. Personally, I find Python simply amazing and delightful to work with. And I consider its syntax, especially semantic indentation which eliminates so much visual noise, to be the best among all languages that ever achieved widespread adoption.

Ive been burned too many times by semantic indentation, (by mostly HAML and CoffeeScript though.)

Helm charts... (Yaml). Of course made far worse than necessary because the tooling is awful.
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