Why Ruby?

[Stephan Soller]

On 12.12.2010 18:01, Simen kjaeraas wrote:
> so <so at so.do> wrote:
>
>>> If we take a look at the very first code example from the talk it
>>> looks like this:
>>>
>>> account.people.each do |person|
>>> puts person.name
>>> end
>>>
>>> You could translate this in two ways when translating into D.
>>> First way:
>>>
>>> foreach (person ; account.people)
>>> writeln(person.name);
>>
>> Am i alone thinking D one better here?
>
> Absolutely not. Ruby reads like Yoda-speak, while D is almost plain
> English. Had foreach used 'in' instead of the semicolon, only
> punctuation and 'ln' would be off.
>

Unfortunately I have to disagree here. If you have well written Ruby 
code (like Ruby on Rails usually provides) it can usually be read like 
plain English. That's the reason why I dropped writing documentation 
comments for Ruby code: it's just redundant.

I'm not at home so I can't post a good example. However I once built a 
website in Ruby on Rails together with another person responsible for 
the content. This person had no programming experience what soever. 
Because I hadn't completed some backend stuff the development version of 
the website threw an exception and the code of the action was displayed. 
I was curious and asked here if she was able to understand what these 
lines do. She was actually able to exactly tell me what the code was 
doing... without ever learning about programming. I doubt this would 
have been possible with D code.

Happy programming
Stephan Soller