Why I started learning (j)ruby

I have been pretty comfortable with Perl for a while in my programming life, but at some point realized, that what Dijkstra says about an impact a programming language has on a programmer's mind, seems to hold. I.e. if you code long the same language eventually you will look at every problem at hand through the prism of what your programming language has to offer to solve it. By this I mean, the data structures, debugging, dumping the data contents into stdout, references, copying, working with file encoding, web and so on. I don't want to go too far stretched in suggesting that even how for or for each loop affect one's mind, just to want to say, that practicing other languages for the same tasks can be quite useful. This still assumes, that each language has its power, and in the case of Perl that are certainly regular expressions.

This post won't compare Perl and Ruby or Ruby to any other language. I just want to note along the way the Ruby features, that I find the most interesting to me.

  probabilities = 10.times.map{Float(rand(0))}
  probabilities.each {|p| print p.to_s + " "}

This prints:

0.972042584650313 0.148158594901043 0.109142777878581 0.825619772397228 0.177120402897994 0.411135204463207 0.0448148166075958 0.996025937730191 0.143679780727901 0.311015907725463

That is, with just two lines of in practice functional code you are able to create an array of 10 random real numbers between 0 and 1 and output them to stdout.

Another compelling feature of ruby is that it can be turned into jruby and then all the java mass of libraries becomes available at your scripting finger tips. Supposing, that you have a text file with some categories separated with semi-colons, you can load them into guava's ArrayListMultimap:

# using guava 13.0.1 in jruby
require 'java'
require '/home/user/.m2/repository/com/google/guava/guava/13.0.1/guava-13.0.1.jar'

def loadCategories
  myCategoryMultimap = com.google.common.collect.ArrayListMultimap.create
  File.open(fName, "r").each_line do |line|
    category = line[/Category=[^;]+/]
    myCategoryMultimap.put category, line
  end
  return myCategoryMultimap

end

To summarize so far, two features: functional style of writing code and java-friendliness make (j)ruby a compelling next language to learn if you come from the scripting / Java world.

P.S. If you are in Finland around Helsinki you might be interested in Helsinki Ruby Brigade where the sessions have been pretty technical and interesting.