Re:Ruby 3.2.0 Is from Another Dimension
by latexr on Wednesday January 04, 2023 @10:22AM
(#34246550)
> it aims to only have one obvious way to do things and so it's easy to guess how apis will work.
I’ve seen that statement multiple times, but in my experience it’s far from the truth. For every thing I ever had to look up in Python I often found more than one way of accomplishing the same task and all of them were (subjectively) uglier and less straightforward than Ruby.
> on "brevity" and "expressiveness", I don't really see them as an attribute that make a language "better". Sure for experienced developers
It’s an attribute including for inexperienced developers. Perhaps especially for them. Even for something as basic¹ as writing a file, one needs multiple lines of code and know about `with` or opening and closing the file². In Ruby: `File.write("/path/to/write.txt", "file contents")`. One line, immediately understandable.
> that doesn't necessarily translate to code that is ideal when working as part of a team, or code that is easy to follow when a new developer starts on an existing codebase.
Agreed. Though in Ruby I have found myself thinking “I wonder if this keyword will work” and it does exactly what I expected. With Python, the norm is frustration with the impossibility of doing the simplest of things like defining a constant.
¹ From the coder’s point of view, never mind the underlying implementation.
² Failing the goal of one and only one obvious way to do something.
I’ve seen that statement multiple times, but in my experience it’s far from the truth. For every thing I ever had to look up in Python I often found more than one way of accomplishing the same task and all of them were (subjectively) uglier and less straightforward than Ruby.
> on "brevity" and "expressiveness", I don't really see them as an attribute that make a language "better". Sure for experienced developers
It’s an attribute including for inexperienced developers. Perhaps especially for them. Even for something as basic¹ as writing a file, one needs multiple lines of code and know about `with` or opening and closing the file². In Ruby: `File.write("/path/to/write.txt", "file contents")`. One line, immediately understandable.
> that doesn't necessarily translate to code that is ideal when working as part of a team, or code that is easy to follow when a new developer starts on an existing codebase.
Agreed. Though in Ruby I have found myself thinking “I wonder if this keyword will work” and it does exactly what I expected. With Python, the norm is frustration with the impossibility of doing the simplest of things like defining a constant.
¹ From the coder’s point of view, never mind the underlying implementation.
² Failing the goal of one and only one obvious way to do something.