# Kudos to all Ruby creators/enhancers/users

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/kudos-to-all-ruby-creators-enhancers-users/75378>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [November 9, 2006, 3:51pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/kudos-to-all-ruby-creators-enhancers-users/75378 "2006-11-09T15:51:04Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 7\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/u/4bbf92/32.png) [@unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/unknown)\
**Post date:** [November 9, 2006, 3:51pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/kudos-to-all-ruby-creators-enhancers-users/75378/1 "2006-11-09T15:51:04Z")

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I can’t stop myself from using 15 minutes of my work time to express my  
gratitude to Matz and everyone else involved with the creation,  
enhancement, and use of Ruby. This comes from a 20 yr procedural  
programmer raised on Basic, Assembler, Cobol, SAS, etc… I’ve been  
learning Ruby for the past year, singing its praises to all around me.  
And my employer, having such value of my opinion, has decided to  
encourage me to learn C#, as it is the standard (from his point of  
view.)

C#, in my opinion, is garbage trying to smell sweet. Especially in the  
area of arrays. And here is where I solicit from you your best C#  
practice to emulate Ruby. It’s a simple matter of how big an array is.  
In Ruby, I elegantly add member to an array using “a \<\< ‘something’.”  
It knows how many elements there are simply by adding. When I want to  
use the elements, I elegantly code “a.each{|x| whatever}”.

Now, in C#, I have to declare the array of a specific type. I have to  
provide a size, x. I then have to brute force assign an element to a  
specific index. And if I want to use the elements of the array, I use  
a foreach statement. And because it is a statement, I have to declare  
the type of receiving variable because foreach doesn’t know the type of  
array. And when foreach executes, it is for every element up to x, not  
the number of populated elements.

Is there and elegant way in C# to append members into an array, and  
execute foreach for each populated member? Or do I have to code my own  
extensions to class array such that it acts like Ruby? Has someone  
already done this in C#?

Once again, I can’t express my appreciation enough. I’m thinking of  
learning C# for my company, but still implement everything in Ruby  
anyway. Hell, I can prototype production ready code in Ruby so much  
faster than I can translate it to C#.

Thanks a bunch,  
dvn

dvn

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**Author:** ![unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/u/4bbf92/32.png) [@unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/unknown)\
**Post date:** [November 9, 2006, 4:35pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/kudos-to-all-ruby-creators-enhancers-users/75378/2 "2006-11-09T16:35:11Z")

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On 11/9/06, removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote:

> Is there and elegant way in C# to append members into an array, and  
> execute foreach for each populated member? Or do I have to code my own  
> extensions to class array such that it acts like Ruby? Has someone  
> already done this in C#?

Look at ArrayList. I think C# is the best of the RAD GUI languages,  
but I still wish every day that I could open up a studio of some type,  
drag some buttons around, double-click on one of them and enter Ruby  
code.

Then I could probably throw away C# and just use Ruby for 99% of my  
work.

Les

–  
Man’s unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather  
than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always  
astounded me. We long for a caring Universe which will save us from  
our childish mistakes, and in the face of mountains of evidence to the  
contrary we will pin all our hopes on the slimmest of doubts. God has  
not been proven not to exist, therefore he must exist.

- Prokhor Zakharov

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**Author:** ![unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/u/4bbf92/32.png) [@unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/unknown)\
**Post date:** [November 9, 2006, 4:37pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/kudos-to-all-ruby-creators-enhancers-users/75378/3 "2006-11-09T16:37:12Z")

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Just saw Qt4 with Ruby bindings… maybe the wait is over!

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**Author:** ![unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/u/4bbf92/32.png) [@unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/unknown)\
**Post date:** [November 9, 2006, 6:47pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/kudos-to-all-ruby-creators-enhancers-users/75378/4 "2006-11-09T18:47:46Z")

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You can play with some of the array manipulation features you mentioned  
downloading LINQ (Language Integrated Query). The upcoming version of  
C#. ([Microsoft Learn: Build skills that open doors in your career](http://msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp/future))  
I`ve been programming with C# since 2000, but since I met Ruby, I wish  
I could write every program in it.  
It’s by far, much more productive than C#. But there is a partial port  
of Ruby to the .NET Platform called Ruby.CLR.  
Lots of people says that with current implementation of the CLR would  
be not possible to support such dynamic language, like Ruby.  
But recently the Ruby.CLR project creator John  
Lam([http://www.iunknow.com](http://www.iunknow.com)), was hired by Microsoft to integrate the  
CLR Dynamic Team to help them improve the CLR Dynamic Support. There is  
already a port of Python called IronPyhton to .NET world.

HTH

Felipe G.

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**Author:** ![unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/u/4bbf92/32.png) [@unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/unknown)\
**Post date:** [November 9, 2006, 10:32pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/kudos-to-all-ruby-creators-enhancers-users/75378/5 "2006-11-09T22:32:32Z")

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Leslie V. wrote:

> Just saw Qt4 with Ruby bindings… maybe the wait is over!

No win32 maintainers. WOE.

David V.

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**Author:** ![unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/u/4bbf92/32.png) [@unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/unknown)\
**Post date:** [November 9, 2006, 10:30pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/kudos-to-all-ruby-creators-enhancers-users/75378/6 "2006-11-09T22:30:31Z")

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removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid wrote:

> C#, in my opinion, is garbage trying to smell sweet. Especially in the  
> area of arrays. And here is where I solicit from you your best C#  
> practice to emulate Ruby. It’s a simple matter of how big an array is.  
> In Ruby, I elegantly add member to an array using “a \<\< ‘something’.”  
> It knows how many elements there are simply by adding. When I want to  
> use the elements, I elegantly code “a.each{|x| whatever}”.

Ruby Array != C# array. Ruby Array = C# ArrayList. (Sort of.)

> Now, in C#, I have to declare the array of a specific type. I have to  
> provide a size, x. I then have to brute force assign an element to a  
> specific index.

Made irrelevant by the above. Learn C# before criticising it.

> And if I want to use the elements of the array, I use  
> a foreach statement. And because it is a statement, I have to declare  
> the type of receiving variable because foreach doesn’t know the type of  
> array.

That has nothing to do with the fact it’s a statement.

AFAIK, C# 3.0 will have type inference for local variables, so you won’t  
have to do that anymore.

> And when foreach executes, it is for every element up to x, not  
> the number of populated elements.

That’s the behaviour of ArrayList too. Ruby’s Arrays compensate this  
with the quirk that out-of-bounds access silently returns nil. (Although  
I think there’s a method with a stricter approach to this.

> Is there and elegant way in C# to append members into an array, and  
> execute foreach for each populated member? Or do I have to code my own  
> extensions to class array such that it acts like Ruby? Has someone  
> already done this in C#?

Use. ArrayLists. Changing class array won’t help anything, because  
they’re a first-class primitive datatype. Ruby doesn’t have an  
equivalent to them, because it uses C arrays as backing storage.

Also, C# 2.0 has lambdas. C# 3.0 will let you add methods to external  
classes. I’d be very, very surprised if there isn’t a library that can  
do each/select/collect/inject for C# 3.0 already, unless .NET 3.0 adds  
that in the framework itself. I don’t follow happenings in dotnetland,  
so I can’t tell.

> Once again, I can’t express my appreciation enough. I’m thinking of  
> learning C# for my company, but still implement everything in Ruby  
> anyway. Hell, I can prototype production ready code in Ruby so much  
> faster than I can translate it to C#.

While Ruby fluffs are always welcome, accompanying them with an  
ill-informed rant makes them taste so bitter. And if the ill-informed  
rant is a flame at another programming language with a completely  
different audience / area of application, their value approaches zero.

David V.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/u/4bbf92/32.png) [@unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/unknown)\
**Post date:** [November 9, 2006, 10:38pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/kudos-to-all-ruby-creators-enhancers-users/75378/7 "2006-11-09T22:38:37Z")

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rhossi wrote:

> You can play with some of the array manipulation features you mentioned  
> downloading LINQ (Language Integrated Query).

LINQ is an abomination, and a marketing scam to make Transact SQL coders  
switch over. It’s horrid abuse of a relational programming language to  
handle object-oriented data, and will at best only lead to wider  
adoption of the “let’s transfer all data from the DB in-process and  
handle them there” school of thought. Lambdas and method calls feel just  
so very much cleaner in OO code, the SQL-ish syntax looks out of place  
and mostly clutters things. And you shouldn’t do joins on OO data anyway  
because those things will kill your performance unless optimised, which  
DBs tend to do better (since the query engine monitors data on input and  
can prepare for queries, unlike LINQ which has to work with arbitrary  
structures.)

End completely unrelated rant.

David V.