Ruby

Coding Horror :: Jeff Atwood :: Why Ruby?

I've always been a little intrigued by Ruby, mostly because of the absolutely gushing praise Steve Yegge had for the language way back in 2006. I've never forgotten this.

For the most part, Ruby took Perl's string processing and Unix integration as-is, meaning the syntax is identical, and so right there, before anything else happens, you already have the Best of Perl. And that's a great start, especially if you don't take the Rest of Perl. But then Matz took the best of list processing from Lisp, and the best of OO from Smalltalk and other languages, and the best of iterators from CLU, and pretty much the best of everything from everyone.

Amen. My Ruby still isn't as idiomatic as I would like it to be, but even with my intermediate level I'm so pleased how it gets out of the way lets me do what I want no matter what paradigm I'm thinking in at the time.

Atwood has this to say himself, which also gets my thumbs-up:

Ruby isn't cool any more. Yeah, you heard me. It's not cool to write Ruby code any more. All the cool people moved on to slinging Scala and Node.js years ago. Our project isn't cool, it's just a bunch of boring old Ruby code. Personally, I'm thrilled that Ruby is now mature enough that the community no longer needs to bother with the pretense of being the coolest kid on the block. That means the rest of us who just like to Get Shit Done can roll up our sleeves and focus on the mission of building stuff with our peers rather than frantically running around trying to suss out the next shiny thing.

I suppose it's in the nature of craftsmen to get a bit giddy about their gear, but at a certain point enough is enough. (This lead to some frustration when I was learning photography a couple of years ago; photography amateurs seem especially prone to gear obsession.) Yeah, definitely choose the right tool for the job, but don't forget the point is the job, not the tool.

I've endured far too many conversations in the break room, and at barbecues, and at happy hour about the supremacy of various languages.

I don't care which languages people are going to be drooling over at SIGPLAN this year.

I don't care what static analysis theorems you can prove using which language.

I don't care how cool your tools are.

I care how cool your results are.

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