Ruby has a lot of expressive language features that seem like aliases for other things but are actually a bit different.
For example, and, or, and not exist which could be interesting alternatives to &&, ||, and ! which are still more common in the language, except they have subtly different behavior so you can't really interchange them per se.
Oh, and that's also the best feature of the language. It's been crafted to be expressive and intuitive. Not settling for inelegant solutions. Tools like [].empty? and the many, many more are really nice to have.
Of course this all comes with performance and memory bloat concerns but it's still a great tool for many jobs.
One thing I would like to emphasize in my to-be-created language is that there should, generally speaking, only be one correct way to do something. I think it would make the syntax more uniform and make things less difficult to document, etc.*
So I suppose at some point I'll have to decide between and vs. &&, not vs. ! vs. ~ and so on. Leaning toward the English-like options.
*One interesting effect this would have is that there would only be one kind of loop. No for vs. while, just some kind of loop feature.
Yeah, Ruby pretty much goes the other way completely with that. I try not to indulge it too much, but this mentality jives with my personality, probably helps create the right coder language fit.
Ruby has a lot of expressive language features that seem like aliases for other things but are actually a bit different.
For example,
and,or, andnotexist which could be interesting alternatives to&&,||, and!which are still more common in the language, except they have subtly different behavior so you can't really interchange them per se.Lots of little ways to cut yourself in that way.
Oh, and that's also the best feature of the language. It's been crafted to be expressive and intuitive. Not settling for inelegant solutions. Tools like
[].empty?and the many, many more are really nice to have.Of course this all comes with performance and memory bloat concerns but it's still a great tool for many jobs.
One thing I would like to emphasize in my to-be-created language is that there should, generally speaking, only be one correct way to do something. I think it would make the syntax more uniform and make things less difficult to document, etc.*
So I suppose at some point I'll have to decide between
andvs.&&,notvs.!vs.~and so on. Leaning toward the English-like options.*One interesting effect this would have is that there would only be one kind of loop. No
forvs.while, just some kind ofloopfeature.Yeah, Ruby pretty much goes the other way completely with that. I try not to indulge it too much, but this mentality jives with my personality, probably helps create the right coder language fit.
Spinoff!
What is your "Coder/Language Fit"
Ben Halpern