Ron M said:
For us people with less broad exposure to esoteric languages, this:
c.map{|b| b.meth}
really isn't as intuitive as you'd think.
If I were to ask people around the office, I'd expect guesses
like these for "c.map{|b| b.meth}":
? It defines a function with the funny name "c.map" that takes
no arguments; that pipes the variable b it's input to b and
then to b.meth (like MSFT's Monad shell's pipe operator)?
? It uses "c" to return a hashtable ("map" sounds like HashMap
in Java) with one element with name "b" and value "b.meth"?
? It takes the locations in the object "c" and plots
the meth labs on the google-map "b"?
Well, *did* you actually ask? What about showing your colleagues a short
Ruby program that contains this like of code and collecting their
interpretation? That would certainly be interesting to hear. IMHO context
helps a great deal in understanding previously unknown concepts.
In defense of "{|x| ...}", I really like it over C-style for
loops. But readability for new users certainly isn't one of
it's strengths.
Consider Microsoft's Monad's
get-childitem | sort-object extension | foreach { $_.filename}
vs Ruby's
get-childitem.sort_by{|child| child.extension}.map{|child|
child.filename}
Msh makes Ruby's 4-time repetition of "child" look quite tedious,
without adding any readability that I can see over the Microsoft
version.
Well, it depends: your line full of pipe symbols looks like a line from a
bourne shell script to me...
I guess you really need some kind of basic
knowledge in either case.
I'd reiterate that I think it's the opposite. Newbies without
the theoretical CS backgrounds are complaining about the parts
that they find confusing or tedious.
It interesting to see how people make different observations: to me it looks
as if I more often read "wow, Ruby is so cool and I can even read it
although I'm a newby".
The one really great part about Ruby, though; is that almost any
time someone complains, someone else posts some magical addition
to some module that gives the complainer almost exactly what he
wanted -- so I'd tend to agree the language shouldn't need many
of these changes.
Agreed.
But I think what's driving the increased requests are mostly
things that people find hard to read, rather than clean
things that people are getting bored with.
Maybe it's not exactly boredom but the human drive to constantly improve
things which is especially strong in engineers and similar folks. While
this force is often good there are many places where too much degrades
things (I'm thinking of the over engineered cars of some German
manufacturers...). That hard part is to identify the optimum and stick with
that. Also, the optimum may change over time, as requirements change.
A general advantage of conservatism is that it doesn't create too many
different variants for the same or similar concept thus limiting the overall
size of the playing field. And this in turn helps people a lot to get
started. Just compare learning curves for natural languages with comlex
rules and syntax with those of languages with only few principles applied
consequently.
Kind regards
robert
