Comments on: What Makes a Programming Language Good

By: Phil

Phil — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 02:22:55 +0000

If you like irb, you should try SLIME, it’s really a whole new level of interactivity.

By: j1n3l0

j1n3l0 — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 21:43:37 +0000

Great post Greg. I agree with most of what you’ve said and I’m glad to see I’m not entirely crazy when I think of features to look for in other languages:

> easy to find and install code
Rubygems does make this a very painless process

> easy to run the code and see its results
irb handles this great and you can quickly try things out, find they work as you expect and make them more permanent 😉

> easy to figure out what the code does
This one i think could do with some work. You’d be surprised how useful a little snippet showing how the module you’ve found could be used can be. Very few gems have this feature, opting instead for a professional website and a list of classes and methods. This is improving but it’s something that has bitten me on a number of occasions … most recently yesterday 🙂

Thanks 🙂

By: Chris Eigner

Chris Eigner — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 17:52:02 +0000

Enjoyed your post Greg. I think you hit the nail on the head. It’s very easy to pull down some code and hop right in to an entirely foreign project. Rubygems, and recently bundler, make it easy to resolve dependencies, getting a local copy of a project up and running can be as simple as 3 commands. The ease of development, and readability of the language to an extent, lower the barrier to entry for contributing to open source ruby projects.

In a sort of language natural selection, I see some of that enthusiasm bleeding into other communities as of late. I would have considered some of the more esoteric languages like Haskell and Erlang out of my immediate reach. But sites like http://learnyouahaskell.com/ and http://learnyousomeerlang.com/ are making these languages much more approachable for beginners.

Good post. Keep up the good work.

By: James Iry

James Iry — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 15:55:47 +0000

> The interactive console is mainly the domain of interpreted dynamic languages (even though compiled Erlang has one too)

Nope! It’s just mainly the domain of non-C languages, whether interpreted or not, whether static or not. http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2011/01/read-eval-print-lie.html

By: Mark Essel

Mark Essel — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 15:46:29 +0000

swap evaluate with enamored

By: Mark Essel

Mark Essel — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 15:45:15 +0000

This goes a long way to explaining how I feel about developing with Ruby and why JavaScript feels like a cousin (albeit a crazy one). Coming from 14 years with c++ I has assumed the dynamic nature and readabilty of code were the features that I was evaluate with. But there’s so much more.

Thanks for pointing out why you appreciate Ruby’s design and usage.

By: Ernie

Ernie — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 13:54:59 +0000

I came to Ruby after spending years in the Perl world, and while I love CPAN, to call Rubygems a “poor man’s CPAN” does an immense disservice to Rubygems.

Greg’s already done a great job explaining what makes Rubygems special, but the most important thing is ease of use, and ease of contribution. The fact that http://www.cpan.org/modules/04pause.html exists to describe the process of contributing to CPAN, while https://rubygems.org/users/new is the process to start contributing to Rubygems should make that difference abundantly clear.

There are many reasons for the data at http://www.modulecounts.com/, but simplicity alone is reason enough.

By: Jim

Jim — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 18:04:54 +0000

I think you’re on to something about the importance of the community. It is more of a meritocracy than other languages. Rubyists earn respect by their programming talent, rather than how many degrees they have, what Fortune 500 company they are working for, or some fancy job title. It just feels more free of corporate BS and “white papers”.

By: greg

greg — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 18:04:48 +0000

Great to hear that Haskell has some of these good features. If you read my post you’ll notice that the whole point of it is not that Ruby is great because it’s dynamically typed or even that Ruby is great at all. It’s just some observations about the sources of pain I’ve experienced using other languages in contrast to some of the things that I found worked smoothly in Ruby because of design consideration given to extrinsic parts of the programming process.

I’m glad Haskell has some of these too, though, I haven’t really been able to get too started with Haskell despite having some interest in it because I haven’t found great friendly, inviting documentation. I bet some it is out there, but it did not immediately reveal itself to a first curious search.

By: florin

florin — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 07:21:55 +0000

Your post betrays love struck. That’s a good thing. As far as I am concerned, I’m waiting for ruby to produce a web framework that does not mix html with code. When that happens, I jump in. My brains numb when I think that some of these dynamic languages wield this arcane templating habits.

When doing java / groovy / javascript, I use IntelliJ IDEA with jrebel. The compilation is on the fly via error highlighting. With jrebel I rarely need to restart the app – webapp or not. Navigating code and refactoring are unmatched.

But I do itch for ruby. Still waiting..