Ruby is SO COOL!

So, I decided to go with Ruby on Rails for this project, because I got so many opinions from either (or both) sides of the fence that it seemed like I couldn’t go wrong with either RoR or Django, and the tiebreaker is that Ruby is more Lisp-like, and Lisp is my favourite language. Boy, was this a good decision.

Ruby is SO COOL. It’s like a wacky chimera of Lisp and Perl, magically brought to life by a wizard waving a magic OO wand.

Ruby has many of the things I love about Lisp, like lambdas and closures:

def n_times(obj)
  return lambda {|n| obj * n}
end

times23 = n_times(23)
times23.call(3) -> 69

Ruby doesn’t have macros (that I’ve learned about yet), but it does have code blocks, which are really frickin’ cool. They’re kind of like Java anonymous inner classes but far more flexible. Get this, as a toy example of a Lisp with-file macro:

class File
  def File.with_file(*args)
    f = File.open(*args)
    yield f
    f.close()
  end
end

File.with_file("testfile", "r") do |file|
  while line = file.gets
    puts line
  end
end

The do..end block forms a code block that is sort of passed to the with_file method as sort of an additional argument. It’s actually more like a coroutine to which control is surrendered by the yield statement. And the parameter passing can go both ways — yield can pass parameters back to the code block, as in this case it passes back the file handle, named f in the method and with a formal parameter name of file in the code block. If with_file were a Lisp macro, yield would be the comma.

And not only is the language itself really cool, but I really like the Ruby community. The foreword to the book I’m reading made me tear up:

“I believe that the purpose of life is, at least in part, to be happy. Based on this belief, Ruby is designed to make programming not only easy but also fun. It allows you to concentrate on the creative side of programming, with less stress. If you don’t believe me, read this book and try Ruby. I’m sure you’ll find out for yourself.”
-Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, creator of Ruby

This post and its code examples were inspired by the PickAxe book.

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