Ruby, Now In English

PM4RK5 writes: "For those of you interested, the News & Observer had an interview with Andrew Hunt about Ruby, in response to a book he and David Thomas authored. The book, "The Pragmatic Programmer" was written for the old-fashioned programmers who seek to learn how to use newer technologies, and use them better. It has an example of code differences between Java and Ruby, on how to print 'Ho Ho Ho.' Contains information and thoughts on its current applications, how its growing, and the types of things that it is suited for."

local press

[b-side.org]

wow, it's weird to see a local rag doing such an in-depth article on programming. well done, N&O. (even weirder that it's my local rag, but, hey..)

since i know all 6 people who read this article are going to skim it for exactly the same thing i did, here it is:

To print "Ho Ho Ho" in Java, you have to write code like this: 'for (int i=0; i 3; i++)
{System.err.print("Ho ");}.'

In Ruby you write:

'3.times do print "Ho " end.'

Re:local press

[VA Software]

Both those programs are buggy.

Neither produce the expected output.

Re:local press

[SnapShot]

There was a bug in the original question. It should have been: print out "Ho Ho Ho ".

Re:local press

[Cheetah86]

Still, I like pythons approach to it more:
for i in range(3): print 'Ho '
It's a little less complex than the ruby example, and much less complex than the java one.

Re:local press

[micje]

3.times {print "Ho "} is complex?

Re:local press

[thrig]

print 'Ho ' x 3;

print 'Ho ' for 1..3;

Mind you, I think it's great we have a handful of languages in the same problem domain-- diversity is spiffy.

Re:local press

[ryanflynn]

(1..3).each{print 'Ho '}

Last year in English

[mlinksva]

Actually Andy and Dave's book [rubycentral.com] has been available for nearly a year. O'Reilly is scheduled to publish Ruby in a Nutshell [oreilly.com] this month, and Matz is scheduled to publish another English tome early next year. Sheesh, even Sams is getting into the picture soon apparently.

More interesting might be slides from last month's Ruby conference [rubyconf.org] as well as a nice writeup with pictures [chadfowler.com]. Wish I could've been there!

Pronoun Mixup

[mlinksva]

The newspaper article contains the Java/Ruby example. The book Pragmatic Programmer was written before they got involved in Ruby, and has no Ruby. To muddy the waters even more, their Ruby book is subtitled The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide, but it doesn't have Java comparisons. Someone will have to write a "Ruby for Java Programmers" book.

Re:Pronoun Mixup

[leifw]

The book Pragmatic Programmer was written before they got involved in Ruby...

Actually, that's not entirely true. They used ruby in the scripts they used to format, etc. the text for the "Pragmatic Programmer".

Familiarity

[zaphod123]

Judging from the code in the article, one of the things that would appear to hinder Ruby is its lack of closeness to other languages. Perl, Java, etc have at their heart, C. You can see this in the bracing uses, control structures, etc.

In the end, this may not be a "bad thing" for Ruby....