Wrapping my head around Ruby (with just a hint of Rails)
I spent much of yesterday’s work day working on a screen-scraping script using Ruby, and wow it’s nice. I kept on finding that I was writing code I didn’t need to; Ruby can compress large, cumbersome structures into clean, readable bits of code. It’s parsimonious, but unlike Perl in that it’s not some inscrutable noise of ampersands and exclamation points.
When I first started learning about Ruby, I thought it was ugly. Way ugly. It didn’t have a sense of closure in its syntax, and it seemed more like the mutant offspring of Python and PHP than anything else. I hear that a lot from others, and it’s an indicator that they haven’t internalized the patterns that Ruby uses.
It’s amazing how much time you can save by using it.
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