Ruby Impressions

["Jürgen A. Erhard"]

>>>>> "Don" == Don Tuttle <tuttledon at hotmail.com> writes:

    Don> C++ & Java guru Bruce Eckel has done a Python/Ruby
    Don> compairison. You can read it at
    Don> http://www.mindview.net/Etc/FAQ.html#Ruby

There's a link to the Ruby site with another comparison (Ruby FAQ
2.1).  And this

   Ruby's syntax and design philosophy are heavily influenced by Perl.

chimes with my early impression of Ruby, in that I feel it's a lot
closer to Perl than to Python.

Stuff like "$_ and friends", "the single-quoted / double-quoted string
distinction" are what put me off *lots*.

Single-quoted / double-quoted: well, that's why I hardly program
anything serious in sh (even in zsh) anymore... "Which quoting, and
which *escaping* gives me *this* string?"

$_, even without its "friends", is *evil* (IMHO)... "Explicit is
better than implicit".  I loath "from xyzzy import *" for this very
reason... if I see "xyzzy.blarg()" I know where to look for the fns
def.  If I see "blarg()" I have to find the module first...

Bye, J

PS: Most folks I've seen liking Ruby came from Perl... coincidence?

PPS: I've looked at Ruby just... about a week ago.  Read into the
rubybook (apt-get install rubybook ;-) Didn't like what I saw.  But
I'm just installing irb again,... guess I do need to code a couple
lines to get a better feel.

PPPS: One test: how do I do the equivalent of Python's "dict={1:2};
print dict; lst=[1,2,3]; print lst"... tried that in Perl, was
completely ugly.  Is Ruby better?

-- 
               Jürgen A. Erhard  (juergen.erhard at gmx.net)
                     My WebHome: http://jerhard.org
                GNU Privacy Guard (http://www.gnupg.org)
                       DMCA -- A.K.A The Gag Rule
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