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> Go Requires curly braces and type declarations. These are easy for beginners to screw up. > Ruby Ruby's syntax makes me want to gouge my eyes out -- it's

by csense 12y ago

> Go Requires curly braces and type declarations. These are easy for beginners to screw up. > Ruby Ruby's syntax makes me want to gouge my eyes out -- it's every bit as bad as Perl. I'm an expert and I hate Ruby. I wouldn't dream of exposing beginning CS students to that crap unless I wanted to convince them to change their major. > Scratch This is a toy language in a toy environment. I don't know the language well enough to judge its syntax, but the author's goal is "...rather swiftly bringing [students] to a level of skill where they can use computing in their other courses: to analyze data for those lab reports, to learn linear algebra, to solve problems in particle mechanics, problems involving differential equations, maybe even to write a program to control a robot." Scratch doesn't seem well-suited to this role, but there's enough language and library support for Python to be used in all these roles and many more.

jeorgun 12y ago
I feel like you're placing way too much emphasis on syntax here. From a non-superficial standpoint, you haven't brought up a single thing wrong with Ruby— or Go, aside from explicit typing. The thing about syntax is that, to some extent, it's subjective. You say Ruby syntax is awful? OK. Personally, when I first started programming, I hated Python syntax¹ so much that I called it quits. It wasn't until later, when I started learning Ruby and its "eye-gouging" syntax, that I could get past that hurdle. So I wouldn't exactly describe its syntax as an argument against using Ruby as a teaching instrument. ¹I've since grown to love it, but as a beginner this was very much not the case.
- freyrs3 12y ago
  Yes, it's pretty universal that people find it uncomfortable to force themselves to think in a language they don't fully understand yet. Whether that's Ruby, Haskell, or Japanese. There are plenty of valid things to compare languages on ( semantics, types, runtimes, etc ) but arguments about lexical syntax are really not that interesting since they're usually just throwing opinions back and forth about which lexical construct is more "readable", as if this term had some objective cross-language meaning.
- csense 12y ago
  Sorry for the necro-reply, but here goes. There are two things about syntax that I think are actually objective. One is that, when beginners read their own source code that isn't working, they often have more of a tendency to read what they intended to write instead of what they actually wrote, especially when it comes to punctuation symbols. This means that, when the indentation is right, but there's a missing -- or extra -- brace or semicolon, it can be very, very difficult problem for a beginner to even see. It's also possible for a beginner to write a program with many instances of brace/semicolon issues, giving a frustrating (and sometimes bewildering) boatload of syntax errors. The second problem is that it's difficult to remember the meaning of symbols. This is true not just for beginners, but also for experts learning a new language with different symbols. This means that the number of symbols in a language should be kept to a minimum. Furthermore, where possible, symbols identical to those used in other languages, or in mathematics, should be used. Where a language has novel ideas that don't exist in other languages, those ideas should usually be expressed by keywords, not symbols. Ruby fails at this. See [1] for an example. I don't mean to pick on this particular project, rather this file is typical of Ruby code. The file contains the following symbols which seem to be used differently from any language I'm familiar with: Less-than sign used in class declaration, use of colons for thing(s) that are neither dictionary literals nor labels, "absolute value" bars in e.g. { |p| p.id }, shift-left operator used in class declaration, question mark used for something besides ternary operator, lines without side effects like "true" and "false" sprinkled throughout the code (is there some "empty operator" that's applied to these lines to give them side effects?). My point is that neither a beginner, nor an expert in non-Ruby languages, can understand the above code without constantly consulting the documentation for the unfamiliar syntax elements (and good luck figuring out how to search for "meaning of -> operator in Ruby" without knowing what the -> operator is actually called!) Whereas most Python programs read like pseudocode and can be reasonably well interpreted even by someone quite unfamiliar with the language. Good languages address that problem by limiting the number of symbols, and making the meaning of symbols as simple and intuitive as possible. Ruby fails utterly on both counts. I think these facts should be simple and obvious to anyone who's ever attempted to learn either Ruby or Python, but I guess this is HN, where an amazing number of people think Ruby is the bees' knees for no reason I can make sense of. [1] https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/2a8aa7429b6f489acd07c99e2e33a09c21c2ba01/app/models/users_project.rb https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/2a8aa7429b6f489acd...

by csense 12y ago

jeorgun 12y ago

I feel like you're placing way too much emphasis on syntax here. From a non-superficial standpoint, you haven't brought up a single thing wrong with Ruby— or Go, aside from explicit typing. The thing about syntax is that, to some extent, it's subjective. You say Ruby syntax is awful? OK. Personally, when I first started programming, I hated Python syntax¹ so much that I called it quits. It wasn't until later, when I started learning Ruby and its "eye-gouging" syntax, that I could get past that hurdle. So I wouldn't exactly describe its syntax as an argument against using Ruby as a teaching instrument. ¹I've since grown to love it, but as a beginner this was very much not the case.

freyrs3 12y ago
Yes, it's pretty universal that people find it uncomfortable to force themselves to think in a language they don't fully understand yet. Whether that's Ruby, Haskell, or Japanese. There are plenty of valid things to compare languages on ( semantics, types, runtimes, etc ) but arguments about lexical syntax are really not that interesting since they're usually just throwing opinions back and forth about which lexical construct is more "readable", as if this term had some objective cross-language meaning.
csense 12y ago
Sorry for the necro-reply, but here goes. There are two things about syntax that I think are actually objective. One is that, when beginners read their own source code that isn't working, they often have more of a tendency to read what they intended to write instead of what they actually wrote, especially when it comes to punctuation symbols. This means that, when the indentation is right, but there's a missing -- or extra -- brace or semicolon, it can be very, very difficult problem for a beginner to even see. It's also possible for a beginner to write a program with many instances of brace/semicolon issues, giving a frustrating (and sometimes bewildering) boatload of syntax errors. The second problem is that it's difficult to remember the meaning of symbols. This is true not just for beginners, but also for experts learning a new language with different symbols. This means that the number of symbols in a language should be kept to a minimum. Furthermore, where possible, symbols identical to those used in other languages, or in mathematics, should be used. Where a language has novel ideas that don't exist in other languages, those ideas should usually be expressed by keywords, not symbols. Ruby fails at this. See [1] for an example. I don't mean to pick on this particular project, rather this file is typical of Ruby code. The file contains the following symbols which seem to be used differently from any language I'm familiar with: Less-than sign used in class declaration, use of colons for thing(s) that are neither dictionary literals nor labels, "absolute value" bars in e.g. { |p| p.id }, shift-left operator used in class declaration, question mark used for something besides ternary operator, lines without side effects like "true" and "false" sprinkled throughout the code (is there some "empty operator" that's applied to these lines to give them side effects?). My point is that neither a beginner, nor an expert in non-Ruby languages, can understand the above code without constantly consulting the documentation for the unfamiliar syntax elements (and good luck figuring out how to search for "meaning of -> operator in Ruby" without knowing what the -> operator is actually called!) Whereas most Python programs read like pseudocode and can be reasonably well interpreted even by someone quite unfamiliar with the language. Good languages address that problem by limiting the number of symbols, and making the meaning of symbols as simple and intuitive as possible. Ruby fails utterly on both counts. I think these facts should be simple and obvious to anyone who's ever attempted to learn either Ruby or Python, but I guess this is HN, where an amazing number of people think Ruby is the bees' knees for no reason I can make sense of. [1] https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/2a8aa7429b6f489acd07c99e2e33a09c21c2ba01/app/models/users_project.rb https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/2a8aa7429b6f489acd...