Learning Ruby

computation opinions

Will Faught

1 minute

I’ve been learning some Ruby the past week or so. Some thoughts:

  • Arrays seem to be lists.
  • Ranges are needed because of eager evaluation.
  • I like that anything defined can be changed later, even visibility or constants.
  • I haven’t found a good explanation of blocks yet, but they appear to be first-class functions with some kind of iterator functionality grafted on.
  • No homoiconic syntax.
  • Abbreviated keywords (def). Yuck.
  • No exposed class variables is a great idea. Methods only!
  • Attribute generators are great for saving time, but is this done through some kind of extensible macro system?
  • The + operator seems to do several things, depending on the operands’ types. Is this extensible, or baked in?
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