Ruby

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Review of Ruby powered by the Slant community.

Ruby is a dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity.

Specs Update

PriceOpen Source (Free)

Current stable version

SiteGZipped size15.

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Pros

Pro

Clean syntax

Ruby has a very clean syntax that makes code easier to both read and write than more traditional Object Oriented languages, such as Java. For beginning programmers, this means the focus is on the meaning of the program, where it should be, rather than trying to figure out the meaning of obscure characters.

Ford”, “Carter”, “Reagan”, “Bush1”, “Clinton”, “Bush2”] for ss in 0.
end

Pro

A large ecosystem of tools & libraries

Ruby has a large ecosystem of tools and libraries for just about every use. Such as ORMs (Active Record, DatabMapper), Web Application Frameworks(Rails, Sinatra, Volt), Virtualization Orchestration(docker-api, drelict), CLI tools(Thor, Commando), GUI Frameworks(Shoes, FXRuby) and the list goes on. If you can think of it, there is probably a gem for that ( and if not you can create your own and share with the community).

Pro

Widely used

Ruby is one of the most popular languages for developing web sites. As a result, there’s an abundant amount of documentation, sample code, and libraries available for learning the language and getting your project up and running. The most popular features are just ‘gem install’ away. Additionally, it is easier to find Ruby jobs because of this.

Pro

Ruby on Rails

Lays out an easy to follow and opinionated MVC pattern that teaches best practices through necessity.

Pro

Newbie-friendly community

Pro

Test Driven Development, #1

It’s the fore-runner and trend setter for TDD.

Pro

Hugely object oriented

Object oriented programming is one of the most important concepts in programming.

Pro

Meta-programming

Meta-programming provides efficiency and freedom.

Pro

No indentation

No indentation increase development efficiency.

Pro

Pry

Cons

Con

Monkeypatching

Requiring a library can change the rules of the language. This is very confusing for beginners.

Con

Its ecosystem is limited outside of web development

If you’re looking to host, generate, manipulate or secure a website, Ruby is your language. There’s also some great support here for infrastructure as code work via Chef. However, it just doesn’t have the depth and breadth that Python does. Things like native UI development, high performance math, and embedded / small footprint environments are barely supported at all in Ruby-space.

Con

Meta-programming causes confusion for new developers

The ability for libraries to open classes and augment them leads to confusion for new developers since it is not clear who injected the functionality into some standard class.

In other words, if two modules decide to modify the same function on the same class can introduce a number of issues. Mainly, the order in which the modules are included matters. Since you more or less can’t tell what kind of “helper” functions a module might write into any class, or for that matter, where the helper function was included from, you may sometimes wonder why class X can do Y sometimes but not at other times.

Con

No docstrings

It’s hard to access Ruby’s documentation from the REPL (irb), unlike Python, Lisp, and Smalltalk which let you ask functions how to use them, which is a great benefit to the beginner, and which also encourages you to document your program as you code it.

Con

Arcane grammar based on Perl

Ruby is too complicated for beginners:

• arcane Perlisms

semi-significant whitespace

parentheses are not necessary around method arguments, except for sometimes they are

Smalltalk (Instead they’re baked into the grammar.

verbose block syntax, unless it happens to be the last argument. (proc lambda).
There are too many exceptional cases and arcane precedence rules.

Con

More than one way to do it

A problem inspired by Perl. The core API interfaces are bloated. There’s at least four different ways to define methods. More is not always better. Sometimes it’s just more.

Con

Does not teach you about data types

Since Ruby is a dynamically typed language, you don’t have to learn about data types if you start using Ruby as your first language. Data types being one of the most important concepts in programming. This also will cause trouble in the long run when you will have to (inevitably) learn and work with a statically typed language because you will be forced to learn the type system from scratch.

Con

Dynamic type system

Majority of bugs could be resolved with types.

Con

Viewed as a web development language

Despite its flexibility and performance, Ruby is often seen as being unsuitable for other tasks by those who are not familiar with it. As such, a lot of discussion about it centers around Rails, which is not at all relevant if you’re using Ruby for something else, such as game development.

Con

Focus on Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)

Focussing on OOP in a beginner stage is an easy and popular plan, but not the best one.