Why Ruby?

[Bruno Medeiros]

On 11/12/2010 13:53, Ary Borenszweig wrote:
> I guess what I liked about it (and Ruby) is that I see everything is
> very consistent and nice to my eyes. I never squeeze my brian to
> understand a piece of code, nor I had to deal with __some__strange
> variable names, or even __keywords.
>
> Code is read many more times than it is written and so it is of huge
> important that code is as readable as possible. Of course this is a
> subjective matter, but I don't understand why some people think __traits
> or __gshared are ok. So what if those are compiler extensions or
> whatever? I don't want to stop thinking about those details of a
> programming language when I'm dealing with another problem. When I read
> Ruby code I feel like I'm reading an English textbook (better, a poem
> :-P), while why I read other languages I feel I'm reading... well, a
> programming language. And my head is so much better at reading text than
> reading machine code.
>
> Then, other things in D like properties for which you do ++ don't work
> or such corner cases doesn't happen in Ruby. It's consistent. Once Ruby
> defines something, it does it well, not just half through it.


I see what with mean with consistency, and I agree with that. Especially 
in regards to criticism of D, yeah, there is a lot of stuff I think that 
could be simplified, removed, made consistent, cleaned, generalized, etc..

But I would never trade those downsides for a language with dynamic 
typing, not even close! And this regardless of whether the language is
systems programmings (like D), or not (like Java).

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer