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0 pointsvidarh13y ago0 comments

Probably. In terms of features, Ruby is pretty much an unholy mix of Smalltalk, Perl, Awk with a dash of Lisp thrown in and a parser that's a monstrosity of epic proportions put on top (the MRI 1.8.x series had a Bison parser with 6k-7k lines of C to implement context-sensitive tweaks...) to make the whole thing have a syntax palatable for those of us who'd otherwise complain loudly about square brackets or parentheses...

And I write this as someone who loves Ruby - there's much to love about Ruby, but a clean design is not it.

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pat_shaughnessy13y ago· 2 in thread

Lol - very funny. I have to agree you; as a Rubyist studying MRI internals there's a lot of very confusing code in there. And FYI Ruby 1.9/2.0 retains the confusing Bison grammar file.

One of my goals with the eBook is to allow readers to get an understanding of how Ruby works without having to struggle through the confusing implementation themselves.

diminish13y ago

But do you agree that Ruby is an unholy mix? I would say it is a holy mix, Matz targeting programmer happiness, principle of least surprise etc.

Speaking of internals, do you know enough internals of Smalltalk, python, Perl implementations to judge, Ruby is confusing compared to them? How would you compare them to Ruby implementions MRI and 1.9/2?

pat_shaughnessy13y ago

No - not the "unholy" part. Like vidarh I'm someone who loves Ruby (why else would I write a book about it!) but I do agree with him about the internal implementation: it's very confusing and hard to understand. At times, this leaks out into the syntax of an otherwise beautiful language. JRuby and especially Rubinius are great alternatives to MRI if you're interested in studying internals - they're much cleaner and easier to understand.

Sorry I don't know anything about the internals of Smalltalk, Python or Perl and can't comment on them.

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