Important features of Ruby

Ruby
1

Dear all,

I’m pretty new to Ruby and I’ve discovered that it has a number of nice
ideas such as blocks and mixins. I wonder, however, what features of
Ruby would the experts consider as being the most important ones? Why
does Ruby gain more and more attention nowadays? Is it due to its
ability to combine OO, functional and scripting ideas? Or due to rapid
development of database-backed web applications with Ruby on Rails?

Thanks in advance,
Alexander

2

[email protected] wrote:

Dear all,

I’m pretty new to Ruby and I’ve discovered that it has a number of nice
ideas such as blocks and mixins. I wonder, however, what features of
Ruby would the experts consider as being the most important ones? Why
does Ruby gain more and more attention nowadays? Is it due to its
ability to combine OO, functional and scripting ideas? Or due to rapid
development of database-backed web applications with Ruby on Rails?

http://reddit.com/search?q=ruby

somewhere in there are articles by Bruce Eckel,Bruce Tate, Ian B.,
Martin Fowle, Sam Ruby etc about ruby vs java vs python vs lisp vs
whatever

3

Thank you for the link!

4

Full closures in a language that can actually get things done and a
syntax that makes them useful.

The ability to pass little blocks of code around that do what you
expect (i.e., have the scope you expect) is powerful but not terribly
uncommon. Having a syntax and standard library that makes using them
both natural and convenient is very special.

5

On 4/1/06, [email protected] [email protected] wrote:

Dear all,

You will get probaly 2**n different opinions, n being the number of
replies
:wink:

I was stuck by two things

  • Very concise OO syntax (and semantics too).
  • Ruby does what you expect it to do.
    This is an interesting one though as it seems to go away a little
    bit
    when we come to the subtilities, but that cannot be helped, I am afraid.

Cheers
Robert

–
Deux choses sont infinies : l’univers et la bêtise humaine ; en ce qui
concerne l’univers, je n’en ai pas acquis la certitude absolue.

  • Albert Einstein