4 ms·

What Is So Great About Ruby?

• joeycfan 16y ago
  The thing about ruby that I like is that it is like geek fanfiction. When you read a piece of fan fiction you can usually follow the writer's sources of inspiration - 'there's a piece from harry potter - he got that idea from star trek - and there's some lord of the rings' etc. You can tell they've read them all and felt a desire to combine them - to see what would happen if Frodo got a lightsabre for instance. since they couldn't find this in the stories, they wrote their own (with widely varying results). ruby is like that in that Mass address PROBLEMS with programming languages. You can tell Mass has struggled with stupid crap in every language out there and decided to write his own. It's hard to name exact examples but over and over again while learning ruby I thought - 'aha that's how BASIC should have done it' and 'why doesn't EVERY language do it like that?' Also, while looking up how to do something it has repeatedly turned out that the solution was the simple one I first thought of and immediately rejected as too easy. Once ruby gets a proper fast compiler it will sweep all before it.