Ruby (via Opal) Review

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Review of Ruby (via Opal) powered by the Slant community.

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Pros

Pro
Elegant 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.

presidents = ["Ford", "Carter", "Reagan", "Bush1", "Clinton", "Bush2"]
for ss in 0...presidents.length
    print ss, ": ", presidents[presidents.length - ss - 1], "\n";
end

Pro
Popular

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.

Cons

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.