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A Quick Tour of Ruby

Ruby Tour — cover art: a ferret in a small red velvet waistcoat sits in the open seat of a brass-and-mahogany carriage on a sunlit cobblestone street, a small leather guidebook open in its paws, ruby-cut gemstones set into the keystones of the buildings catching the afternoon light.

2004 · Drunken Blog Rants · Tour

“Going from Perl to Ruby is as big a step in expressive power as going from C++ to Java. Within about three days, I was more comfortable with Ruby than seven years had made me with Perl. You have to learn Perl by memorizing, but you learn Ruby by understanding.”
— From Ruby Tour, 2005
Read the essay

© 2004 Steve Yegge. Originally published at Drunken Blog Rants.

AI Notes

Steve had spent 2005 quietly looking for a Perl replacement, having written off Ruby fans as "ferret owners" who couldn't stop talking about their beady-eyed albino stretch-limo rats. Then his Perl honeymoon ended, the alternatives looked worse, and he opened Matz's Ruby in a Nutshell and made it all the way through pounding the table at things finally done right. The tour that follows is the part that converted readers: a walk through irb (an interactive session that will tell you the 118 methods of an empty array), the dictionary-words example (print all Q-words from /usr/share/dict/words, grouped by length, sorted alphabetically — five lines of Ruby versus a page and a half of Java), the case for collection operations that return collections, the defense of open classes, and a long detour through why functional-style code emerges naturally in Ruby without any of the surrounding religion.

Steve's clearest 2005-vintage statement of what comfortable feels like in a programming language. Pairs with A Little Anti-Anti-Hype (the marketing frame) and Lisp Wins (I think) (the theoretical one); Ruby Tour is the practitioner's chapter of all three.

Related listings

  • 2005

    A Little Anti-Anti-Hype

    Same year — the marketing argument that frames Ruby Tour. Steve in this piece is the enthusiastic Ruby evangelist whose existence Bruce Eckel was complaining about.

    Listing · Drunken Blog Rants

  • 2005

    Lisp Wins (I think)

    Same year — the more theoretical companion. Ruby Tour shows what comfortable looks like in practice; Lisp Wins explains why comfort is structurally limited in languages without real metaprogramming.

    Listing · Drunken Blog Rants

  • 2004

    Tour de Babel

    A year earlier — the broader language survey. Ruby Tour is the long-form chapter that Tour de Babel kept hinting at and finally got.

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