Ruby

What I Love

The name!!

Ruby is such a cute name, and what drew me to the language in the first place (no seriously).

Calling packages ‘gems’ is also peak programmer humour. Love it.

method!

Using method! for in-place variants of method is genius. Absolute genius. It’s such an easy, consistent and elegant way of doing it, and makes me wish other languages had it.

Blocks

They were weird at first, but they’ve kinda grown on me. It’s essentially an anonymous lambda function, but the fact that you can expand it is really helpful sometimes.

Optional Parenthesis

These being optional was also weird, but I can certainly see the merits. It does make passing around callable objects a little more fiddly? Nevertheless, it’s definitely a distinctive part of Ruby’s character.

The blurred line between an instance variable and get/set methods is super cool to me.

class Look
  def initialize(sup:)
    @sup = sup
  end

  def sup
    @sup
  end

  def sup=(val)
    @sup = val
  end
end


yo = Look.new(sup: 2.0)
yo.sup #=> 2.0

yo.sup = "ayo" #=> 'ayo'

String Interpolation

Super quick and easy. No adding symbols before the opening quote mark needed, which is really nice when you need to add interpolation to a string.

puts "Ruby is #{'awesome'.uppercase}"

Structs

Lightweight classes.

Path Handling

The way Ruby handles paths saves me so many headaches compared to everything else. require_relative is such a blessing, and Pathname works wonderfully.

Rake

What an awesome tool. Love that it’s just a Ruby file in essence too.

ruby "sup-world.rb"

What I Love Less

end

I’m just not a fan of end in general. It clutters the code with way too much irrelevant boilerplate text, which is nowhere near as easy to ignore as curly beaces.

Syntax

Ruby’s syntax just looks a bit funky in general. I mean, it gives it character for sure, but it’s also somewhat inconsistent at times. It doesn’t magically ‘slot’ together in the same coherent way that Python manages?

Function Parameters

Function parameters take both positional and keyword arguments.

Public Instance Variables

Having to explicitly declare these gets a bit long when you have a lot of properties.

class Uh
  attr_accessor :a, :really, :long, :collection, :of, :public, :instance, :variables
end

Symbols & Strings

Converting between symbols and strings, and having to deal with @ and @@ in classes is fiddly.

To be honest, while I love declarings hashes like:

hash = {
  key: "val"
}

Strings are often much easier to work with than symbols.