Ruby 1.9.0 Released

sciurus0 writes "The 1.9.0 development version of the Ruby programming language has been released. This version has many changes, including a new virtual machine that provides great speed improvements."

Comments

Re:Why Ruby?

[Tyler Eaves]

Ruby is a neat language. Basically imagine a language that can do all of the great hacks you can do in perl (and then some) but with a sane syntax. Python is a very very good language, I've written quite a bit of code in it. Ruby is nicer, at least from a syntax standpoint. It's just SO expressive, even beating python. But, at least until now, the speed always SUCKED balls. Maybe this new release will get it roughly on par with python.

Re:Why Ruby?

[astrashe]

I don't know Python, and I don't want to try to compare Ruby with it. And I'm not a real programmer, just an amateur, so take this with a big grain of salt. I could be completely wrong here.

The heart of Ruby is its use of idiom. It's a difficult thing to describe, and I don't know how you'd find some metric to measure it, or to compare it to another language. But it's very clean, and very sensible, and surprisingly simple, at least on the surface.

There's a kind of aesthetic pleasure to be had in the syntax of Ruby. I was about to write that in that sense it's kind of an anti-perl, but that's flame bait, and I never connected with perl, and lots of people probably find perl beautiful. But Ruby is really great.

You can do things like:

1.upto(10) {|x| puts x }

Which does:

1
2
3 ...

This thing looks a lot like an old fashioned for/each loop, but it's an iterator, and the code in the curly brackets is a closure. So under the hood, it's fairly different from a for/each loop.

There are a few things to mention about this.

First, because there are lots of iterators on the shelf, and because you can write your own iterators if you want, this thing is a lot more powerful than looping constructs in many other languages.

Second -- and this is the sort of thing I was trying to get at above -- the syntax for closures is tweaked so it makes human intuitive sense when you're using closures with iterators. In your head, you might be thinking in for/each terms, and the syntax colludes with you if you want to hang on to that useful fiction.

In Lisp, you can never forget about the lambdas. In Ruby, you just sort of do what you want, and the lambdas are there under the hood, but they're not jumping out at you in the same way. Ruby's syntax fits the way a lot of people think, and it hides the stuff that it makes sense to hide, and exposes the stuff that it makes sense to expose.

And when you write out that line of code, its meaning is very clear and easy to grab a hold of, and it turns out that it's usually very concise and compact as well.

This is a little redundant, but I want to stress it, that line of code really is a pretty thing, in a sense. It's not so remarkable if you think of it as a for/each loop, but it's not a for/each loop -- it's an iterator and a closure, and that's a somewhat complicated thing, but here it isn't complicated, or opaque. It's clean, and it makes sense, and it's concise, but most of all, the shape of the code conforms to the shape of the idea in your head. That's what Ruby is all about, and you see that over and over and over again.

Third, this approach to idiom is a real dual edged blade for me, because there's a culture in Ruby books that sort of says, "You know what this line of code is doing, so don't worry too much about the lambdas." For a long time, I felt lost in Ruby -- like, I kind of knew what the code was going to do, but I wasn't exactly sure what was going to happen under the hood. That's a really uncomfortable place to be. I had to watch the SICP lectures to really grab hold of Ruby.

It's always dangerous to talk about some other culture -- I could be way off base here, and I hope I don't say anything really dumb. But it feels Japanese to me -- it reminds me of a drawing where there aren't many lines, but all the lines are kind of perfect and clean. It's got that same sense of elegance to it. Let's boil this big thing down to its essence, and make it beautiful and sparse.

I can't tell you that Ruby is better than some other language. But I can tell you that it's very beautiful, and that the beauty lives in lots of small little details. The experience of learning and using Ruby is one of noticing these little things and saying, "Wow, how great is that?"

I used to live in an apartment building that had been designed by a famous architect -- Mies van der Rohe. The design made a difference -- I can't tell you why or how, exactly, but it d