Comments | mvanier: Ruby critique, part 1

mvanier

Ruby critique, part 1

Jan 16, 2008 16:10

A couple of friends of mine have written a book about Ruby on Rails called RailsSpace. I was a tech reviewer for the book (at least for a while, long story). I was interested in the book because I've always wanted to learn web programming (well, maybe not in the womb, but immediately after that for sure) and Rails seemed like a mature and agile ( Read more... )

Comments 4

darius January 17 2008, 07:22:39 UTC

I haven't got nearly this far into Ruby, but the turnoff I encountered was, it was too eager for my taste to do something defaulty instead of raising an error. I don't remember specifically, something like getting a missing element from a hashtable, or using an uninitialized variable.

Presumably the language is less surprising to people with the right background -- Perl seems to be that way.

Railsspace sounds interesting -- I like to see books organized around writing a significant program.

mvanier January 17 2008, 07:28:35 UTC

RailsSpace is a pretty good book, at least what I read of it. I have some issues with the Rails framework as well, which I may write about in another post. Basically, it comes down to the fact that Rails uses metaprogramming hooks too much for my taste, leading to lots of "magic" code that does the right thing but that is pretty incomprehensible. What little I know of Django makes it appear that Django does much less of this, but we'll see.

Interesting rubynho January 17 2008, 09:38:07 UTC

As a Ruby users who started using it over 5 years ago, I don't have a problem with other people raising valid concerns about the language ( ... )

Re: Interesting mvanier January 17 2008, 22:34:55 UTC

Well, I really like Lisp and Scheme (the latter particularly). I have some minor syntactic gripes with Scheme in the other direction (a little syntactic sugar could make Scheme much more pleasant in some cases). Both Python and Ruby steal a lot from Scheme/Lisp without capturing the essence of the language. Too bad they aren't used more in the Real World.

As for "total += 1000 if scored_a_point", I'm not a fan, but it's tolerable. If that was the only annoying thing about Ruby I'd let it slide.

I'm happy to let Ruby programmers enjoy their language. Hopefully they will evolve it much as Python (and Haskell, and...) are evolving. I know there is a lot of interest in Ruby VMs and scoping; I suppose those are the most important things to get right now.