Thousands of words on Ruby

Ruby
1

I just finished a much-too-long series of essays on Ruby from a whole
bunch of angles, some here might enjoy it: http://www.tbray.org/
ongoing/When/200x/2006/08/17/JRuby

-Tim

2

On Sep 6, 2006, at 4:40 PM, Tim B. wrote:

I just finished a much-too-long series of essays on Ruby from a
whole bunch of angles, some here might enjoy it: http://
ongoing by Tim Bray · The Ruby Ape Diaries

I found it interesting reading. It really felt like early
explorations of the language. Here are some random thoughts I had
while reading:

  • There are multiple places to get XML escaping from the standard
    library, but since you are familiar with REXML I’ll recommend:
    REXML::Text.normalize(“Some & text < foo > " bar”)

  • I really like that Ruby leaves the power to decide where to store
    code in our hands. Just to give random example of how this is cool,
    I purposefully keep my FasterCSV library in one long source file.
    When I’m working on some project and need to work with CSV, I drop
    the file in vendor/ and I’m all set.

  • http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/2006/06/13/do-i-need-these-
    parenthese

  • A DSL is slightly more than method calls without parentheses. The
    idea is to adapt your language to the problem domain, so the solution
    is very naturally expressed in the language of the problem.

  • For markup generation: have you tried Builder?

  • The “helper methods” referred to in the quoted Markaby
    documentation are a Railsism. I suspect that’s why you had trouble
    understanding the quote.

  • I mean this in the nicest possible way, of course, but you’re dead
    wrong about that IDE thing. :wink: I have a solution for each point you
    listed in TextMate and I would be shocked if you can’t do similar
    things in emacs (the editor I believe you are using). I’m happy to
    post them, if there’s interest.

  • I’m looking forward to your Unicode talk. Just remember to start
    it with, “Ruby supports Unicode today.” :wink: It really, really bugs
    me that everyone claims Ruby has no Unicode support. Don’t be like
    them. As long as you get off to a good start like that, I’ll be very
    interested in the rest of your talk and I won’t lead the lynch mod
    your essay hints at.

James Edward G. II

3

On 9/6/06, Tim B. [email protected] wrote:

I just finished a much-too-long series of essays on Ruby from a whole
bunch of angles, some here might enjoy it: http://www.tbray.org/
ongoing/When/200x/2006/08/17/JRuby

-Tim

I would highly recommend autotest, which is part of ZenTest, to take
tdd to the next level. Autotest has your desired “one keystroke”
beat, as its zero keystrokes to run any test. It monitors your files
and automatically runs tests when it sees the tests or related files
changed.

I’m using it for rails work and its great. There are some minor
annoyances, such as not picking up integration tests or tests in /lib
correctly right now, but its not very hard to hack stuff into the
source.

  • rob
4

On Sep 7, 2006, at 9:22 AM, James Edward G. II wrote:

Here are some random thoughts I had while reading:

One more that came to me later:

  • I like XPath, but some libraries do a neat job of allowing you to
    tree walk with Ruby. See Rubyful Soup and Hpricot for a couple of
    great examples.

James Edward G. II