Ruby Impressions

[Michael Kelly]

On Sun, 13 Jan 2002 23:35:23 -0000, "czrpb" <nanotech at europa.com>
wrote:

>This pretty much closed the book on Ruby for me--another language
>which simply wanted to do "cool things" but did/does not care about
>readability.

My impression after only trying Ruby for a week or two is that
one can do Perl type things perhaps a bit easier than in Perl
and can do some Smalltalk type things a lot easier than in
Smalltalk(at least AFA newbies are concerned.)  I don't
particulary like the $? variables taken over from Perl but
I suppose the thought may have been that some cutting
and pasting may be easier if stuff like $_ was still there.
I guess too they have some module that will substitute
more readable names for the $? type variables if desired.

Ruby doesn't have the modules that even
Python has so I guess it's still starting out but it does
look like it's aimed more at those who like to be able
to tweak things, like overloading operators and that
type of thing.

Anyway, I guess with the shrinking market there's a lot
of paranoia about which languages will survive but I
don't think Perl/Python/Ruby people cutting each
other up is going to help much.  Seems like winning
converts from people new to scripting who venture
into C# because they know C might be more fruitful.
Show them what else is possible.. that type of thing.


Mike

--

"I don't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member."
    -- Groucho Marx