Six things about Ruby

As an experienced VBA developer, Ruby sounds quite exotic, for Londoners a Ruby is slang for curry (Cockney rhyming slang - Ruby Murray -> Curry). I chose to research Ruby to see if it is a language worth learning and here are ten things I didn't know about Ruby which perhaps I should.

1. Ruby is Japanese. Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, object-oriented, general-purpose programming language. It was designed and developed in the mid-1990s by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto in Japan. As such a lot of early documentation was only available in Japanese.

2. Ruby is very object-orientated with strong Smalltalk influences. I studied Smalltalk at university and it is very OO as is Ruby. In both Ruby and Smalltalk everything is an object and objects repond to messages. So even strings are objects. Want to know the length of a string in Ruby? Then send the string object the message 'length' by evaluating the expression

"HelloWorld".length

3. In Ruby, code blocks can be defined either with curly braces of with def|if|do..end keyword pairs. Some languages insist on curly braces to define code blocks whereas VBA (and others) use keyword pairs to delimit, e.g. If..Endif Sub..End Sub While..Wend . In Ruby you have the choice between the two. Example from wikipedia...

{ puts 'Hello, World!' } # note the braces
# or:
do
  puts 'Hello, World!'
end

4. Ruby has dangerous methods denoted by ! (bang) which mean an object's state can be modified. C# has the x++ increment operator which is short for x=x+1. So x++ doesn't just evaluate x+1 it modifies x as well. Ruby has dangerous methods which are similar and denoted with the ! bang symbol.

foo = "A STRING"  # a string called foo
foo.downcase      # returns "a string"

BUT

foo = "A STRING"  # a string called foo
foo.downcase!     # modifies foo to be "a string" permanently

Imagine how much typing you could save with this feature!

5. Ruby On Rails bears architectural similarities to ASP.NET

Most non-Ruby (i.e. Microsoft) programmers have heard of Ruby because of Ruby-On-Rails which is a web framework. What they might not know is that there is similarity to ASP.NET particularly its MVC variants. Ruby-On-Rails organises its project folders by models, views and controllers. Views, HTML, are rendered using string interpolation just like ASP.NET. There is an Object Relational Mapping (ORM) layer called ActiveRecord as a direct analogue to .NET's EntityFramework

6. Ruby Is Not Too Slow For Web-Scale

https://www.speedshop.co/2017/07/11/is-ruby-too-slow-for-web-scale.html

Miscellany

https://rosenfeld.herokuapp.com/en/articles/ruby-rails/2017-05-01-feeling-alone-in-the-ruby-community-and-replacing-rails-with-roda
https://rosenfeld.herokuapp.com/en/articles/ruby-rails/2017-05-03-ruby-on-rails-the-bad-and-good-parts
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=rebornix.Ruby
file:///N:/Rails_on_MIcrosoft.pdf
https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/ruby-from-other-languages/
http://tryruby.org/levels/3/challenges/1
https://www.speedshop.co/2017/07/11/is-ruby-too-slow-for-web-scale.html
https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r14&hw=ph&test=json

Matz