Ashley Moran
7/9/2006 1:42:00 AM
On Jul 08, 2006, at 11:31 pm, dblack@wobblini.net wrote:
> Beware the dot, though. It can give you English, but at the expense
> of Ruby style. When I see:
>
> x = half.of.the.first.item.in(container)
>
> I want to know, and understand, what the message "the" means to the
> return value of a call to "of" -- and it isn't easy. Of course it's
> all legal Ruby, and can be documented... but it really sails beyond
> the horizon of what i would consider reasonable use of method-call
> syntax. In fact it's often a case of method-call syntax being used
> for method-*name* semantics.
David
That's a good point I hadn't considered. I don't know what to think
really. On the one had, I like code that is readable in the sense
that you can see what it does; on the other, I like to read code
where I can see *how it does it*. I think the former usually wins
though, or we'd all be programming in assembly.
Rails has got a lot of people using Ruby tricks that they don't fully
understand (eg collecting hashes and arrays in method definitions).
We're just starting to use it where I work, and first developer has
had to dive in and use Rails with only a token understanding of
Ruby. (Maybe I'm just weird - I prefer to understand how singleton
classes and method rewriting work before I go headfirst into crazy
stuff like Hello World!)
It's good that Ruby can be made so readable that you don't *need* to
understand it in depth to do useful stuff, but I think it will be the
undoing of many a newbie as they move to more ambitious projects.
I'm crossing my fingers that Rails doesn't become to web database
apps what Access is to desktop database apps! (What a terrible
thought to go to bed on...)
Ashley