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Honestly, I never could get into the Ruby language. I always kept making mistakes with the syntax and ended up gravitating towards python and relearning JavaScr

Honestly, I never could get into the Ruby language. I always kept making mistakes with the syntax and ended up gravitating towards python and relearning JavaScript

Evrone 7y ago
Why we choose Ruby for our projects https://evrone.com/why-ruby https://evrone.com/why-ruby
Hamuko 7y ago
Same. I always felt that Python was actually designed for humans and that Ruby had an incomprehensible syntax.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  I never did much with Ruby beyond toy problems, but I was impressed by the lengths the language goes to to make it convenient to express what you want to do. There's one syntax for half-open ranges and another syntax for closed ranges. You can index an array any number of different ways: "get me the 5th element". "Get me the element three back from the end". "Get me elements 5 through 8 (inclusive)". "Get me 0 through 6 (exclusive)". "Get me the 3-length subarray starting at index 2". A hash table returns nil by default when you access a key that isn't stored. But you can change the default value as a property of the table itself. Users now don't need to remember to supply their own default value when they're looking in the hash table. Even more, you can specify a function that gets called when a nonexistent key is accessed, to do whatever is appropriate. All of those are great things. It's easy to translate your algorithm that says "take a stretch of three elements starting from i" into an access that looks like array[i..i+2]. But the semantics of your algorithm start slipping away as you make adjustments like that. If what you're doing is taking substretches of 3 elements each, there's a gain from being able to express it as array[i, 3], as semantically distinct from taking a substretch between two independent bounds that happen to be i and i+2. But the flip side of this is that if you're not regularly immersed in the language, it's really easy to lose track of precisely which bit of syntax does what.
lolc 7y ago
Ruby was the first language I truly liked programming in. But the ecosystem never clicked with me.

Honestly, I never could get into the Ruby language. I always kept making mistakes with the syntax and ended up gravitating towards python and relearning JavaScript

Evrone 7y ago

Why we choose Ruby for our projects https://evrone.com/why-ruby https://evrone.com/why-ruby

Hamuko 7y ago

Same. I always felt that Python was actually designed for humans and that Ruby had an incomprehensible syntax.

thaumasiotes 7y ago
I never did much with Ruby beyond toy problems, but I was impressed by the lengths the language goes to to make it convenient to express what you want to do. There's one syntax for half-open ranges and another syntax for closed ranges. You can index an array any number of different ways: "get me the 5th element". "Get me the element three back from the end". "Get me elements 5 through 8 (inclusive)". "Get me 0 through 6 (exclusive)". "Get me the 3-length subarray starting at index 2". A hash table returns nil by default when you access a key that isn't stored. But you can change the default value as a property of the table itself. Users now don't need to remember to supply their own default value when they're looking in the hash table. Even more, you can specify a function that gets called when a nonexistent key is accessed, to do whatever is appropriate. All of those are great things. It's easy to translate your algorithm that says "take a stretch of three elements starting from i" into an access that looks like array[i..i+2]. But the semantics of your algorithm start slipping away as you make adjustments like that. If what you're doing is taking substretches of 3 elements each, there's a gain from being able to express it as array[i, 3], as semantically distinct from taking a substretch between two independent bounds that happen to be i and i+2. But the flip side of this is that if you're not regularly immersed in the language, it's really easy to lose track of precisely which bit of syntax does what.

lolc 7y ago

Ruby was the first language I truly liked programming in. But the ecosystem never clicked with me.