Ruby First Impressions

I decided to try out Ruby today. I have wanted to try it out for quite a while. Some of my impressions may be inaccurate, but I have done what I can. I have Zero interest in DB and web ‘programming’ so I am going to skip rails and related material.

Edit
I intially tried to use JetBrains’ RubyMine and had a few issues. Since then I tried it again and everything worked great. It is very comparable to Ruby In Steel (IMHO) and another great product from JetBrains.

I installed Ruby In Steel Personal Edition and that was a great way to get started. I ran the installers and I was up and running in a familiar environment. I created a Ruby project and I started with hello world. After that I started going through the guide at Techtopia and the RDocs. I love the product for a free version, but for someone trying to learn Ruby, the intellisence feature would be handy. I am never going to pay $200 for an IDE that I would use as a hobby; that being said, if I ever were to program Ruby as a job, $200 is a great price.

What I like

• very straightforward language
  • I loved that when I wanted to shift the elements of an array I found it was built-in
• Class library
• being able to have a line of code like this; I wish I knew what to call it
  • return SolveUsingClosedFormExpression( n ) if ( 0..1474 ).include? n
  • return SolveUsingClosedFormExpression( n ) if (0..1474) === n
• I will complain about this as well, but in writing the closed form Fibonacci solution, the data type changes allowing for huge results
  def SolveUsingClosedFormExpression(n)
  left = GOLDENRATIO ** n
  right = (-GOLDENRATIOINV) ** n
  return ( (left – right) / ROOT5 ).to_i
  end

What I didn’t like

• Trying to figure out how to use gems (packages, not the tool) and files in the class library
• Lack of type information
  • Yes, yes, I know, I know, but for a c, c++/cli, c#  programmer, it feels just wrong
  • Declaring a variable feels like I am introducing a magic variable – *poof* it exists. At least in TI-Basic I had to declare my dynamically typed variables. \
  • Lack of method return types
• At least four ways to return a value from a method, see below.
• Inconsistent API
  • I was very frustrated when trying to use .power! only to find that it isn’t defined for Float types – I have to use ** everywhere.
• Ruby is supposed to be super OO, but what object contains puts/print?

What I really didn’t like

def multiplyWithReturn(val1, val2 )
    result = val1 * val2
    return result
end

def multiplyLocalVariable(val1, val2 )
    result = val1 * val2
end

def multiplyNoVariables(val1, val2 )
    val1 * val2
end

def multiplyAssignToMethodName(val1, val2 )
    multiplyAssignToMethodName = val1 * val2
end

puts multiplyWithReturn(5,6)
puts multiplyLocalVariable(5,6)
puts multiplyNoVariables(5,6)
puts multiplyAssignToMethodName(5,6)

Running this code prints 30303030

I don’t know if I am missing a key ‘feature’ of the language, but at least four ways to return a value from a method just really irks me. Given that there is no return type of a method, reading code to determine what is returning a value and what methods are void seems ridiculous.

I have never programmed in a dynamic language, so it has been a bit of a ride. There a so many nuances to the language, it will take a while to get them down, but they allow for very concise code.