Phil is talking about Ruby. Again, semi-realtime notes on Ruby.
Ruby is roughly 10 years old now. Matz liked Perl's text processing but didn't think that Python was OO enough. It's more of a Perl/SmallTalk blend. Classes, methods, objects, exceptions, message passing, iterators, closures, garbage collection, etc. And it's multi-platform, of course.
Back in 2000, Phil used a lot of Perl but found OO Perl tedious.
Why learn Ruby? It has a similar syntax but is different enough in some places to make you think differently. Strings, hashes, arrays, etc. Ruby can use any object as a key to a hash. Regexes, here-docs, etc.
@ means instance variable inside a class, not an array. The $ denotes global scope variable. @@ denotes a class variable. Semi-colons are optional at the end of line. Parens are optional in method calls.
False and nil are false. But 0 and '0' are true. Everything is an object.
Smaller community for Ruby, but that's okay.
Lots of interesting on-screen examples that I can't reproduce easily, so I'll just watch.
Posted by jzawodn at July 10, 2003 12:06 PM
0 is true?!?
This sensation in my head must be what those Python-haters feel when they unfairly dismiss a language with meaningful whitespace.
(I like Ruby to the small extent that I've played around with it. I use Python every day and I freaking love it.)
